The Ipané ..

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THE IPANE

" Norroway, Norroway, beyond the Sea"

TALES OF HEARSAY

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

With an Introduction by
R. B. CUNNINGHAMS GRAHAM

75. 6d. net.
SOME PRESS OPINIONS

Daily Telegraph says : "In every
way worthy to take their place in the
Author's Collected Works."

The Scotsman says : "It makes a
substantial addition to Conrad's best
work."

The Spectator says : " These four
stories are thoroughly worthy of him,
and illustrative of his qualities."

Daily Mail says : "A remarkable
addition to the long list of Conrad's
great works."

Daily Dispatch says : " One of the
most remarkable books of short stories
ever issued."

Manchester Guardian says : " The
four tales are no unconsidered trifles.
. . . They are of the stuff by which
he will be judged."

T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., LONDON

THE IPANE

By R. B. CUNNINGHAMS GRAHAM

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD.

LONDON : ADELPHI TERRACE

First published 1890

Second Impression (Cabinet Library) . 1925

£0/3

PREFACE

NONE of the following sketches and stories
have the least connection with one
another, or with each other (I'un et I'autre se
disent.)

But it may chance that thus collected some one
may see in them a nexus undiscerned by me :
mystic, I hope, for it is in the fashion, and no
one, even in literature, who cares to lag behind.

Now, to my thinking, misapprehension still is
rife as to the motives which cause men to write.
Books have been written for many purposes,
moral, religious, lewd, improving, ethical, and to
make people stare ; but many think, even to-day,
when education, which, as we all know, intensifies
artistic comprehension, spreading it even amongst
the educated, is so diffused, that men write books
to please a mysterious entity known as the public ;
that they regard this Mumbo- Jumbo as politicians
do, or as the county councillor who is uncertain
even if he be a cuckold till he has duly put the
matter to the democratic vote.

Nothing more false. For the most part all
books are written from vanity, for hope of gain,
either pecuniary or of some other nature, and
now and then to please the writer, for it is known

PREFACE

that some have gone to sea for pleasure, and
sailors say that those who do so would go to hell
for fun.

And so of books. Few men know why they
write, and most men are ashamed of all they do
when once it stares them in the face in moulded
type.

Thank Heaven I wrote that which is here
collected to please no single being, and if my own
feelings may be taken as the measure of the dis-
cerning public's generous judgment, I have
succeeded well.

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

January, 1899.

vi

CONTENTS

Page

THE IPAN£ 9

UN PELADO ,. 26

UN ANGELITO 36

THE LAZO 47

THE BOLAS 58

s.s. "ATLAS " .>. V, .. .. 68

BRISTOL FASHION .. .. .. .. 84

TANGER LA BLANCA .. .. .. 99

A SURVIVAL r 107

HEATHER JOCK I2O

SALVAGIA .. .. 130

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 141

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND .:. .. 156

NIGGERS . . . . : v. i * - , . 164

AT TORFAIEH • • • I8

THE IPANE

THE " Casa Horrocks " stood at the junction
of one of the sandy staircased water-
courses which did duty for side streets in Asuncion
de Paraguay, and a deserted plaza overgrown
with castor-oil plants and with wild indigo,
bounded by ruined houses on one side and on the
other by a few mameys, and by a hedge of orange-
trees, in which at night the fireflies glistened,
flashing to and fro as they were humming-birds
all dipped in phosphorus. By day the horses of
the neighbours played about and fought with one
another ; or, tied with a " maneador " to a
stout peg, stood drowsily stamping at flies and
hanging down their heads in the fierce sunlight.
Sometimes a company of prisoners armed with
machetes made pretence to cut down grass,
their guards meanwhile unarmed and smoking
in the shade. In South America at the time I

9

io THE IPANE

write of (for now I fear that competition has
brought about an economic change), prisoners
seemed to think themselves an honoured class ;
few took the trouble to escape, but if their guards
got drunk or misbehaved themselves, the prisoners
not infrequently escorted them back to the gaol.
Yet so strong is habit that these selfsame men,
who most of them could have escaped at any
moment, and many of whom came, went, and
worked about the country towns, spoke of them-
selves with tears in their eyes as " los cautivos "
and seemed to think their not uncomfortable lot,
most undeserved.

The Casa Horrocks had scant architectural
pretentions, and yet was not less pleasing than an
" aesthetic " house " faked " up with terra-cotta
work looking like ill-burnt piecrust, and with the
woodwork gaping after an English winter's rain.
Built round a courtyard with an " algibe " in the
centre to catch the rain, the walls " adobe,"
solid and well cemented over ; the open ceilings
showed great beams of " jacaranda " or of
" canela " ; flat the roof as roofs of houses in the
East ; eaves deep, and from them slender tubes
of hardwood sticking out a foot or two to carry off
the rain, which in the rainy season spouted like
waterfalls upon the passers-by ; the rooms all
opening into the court and into one another ; the
door of solid " urunday/' studded with wrought-
iron nails, and from it a dark passage called the
" zaguan," which led to a second floor furnished

THE I PANE ii

with spy-hole, and with two small embrasures to
fire from, should the " infidel " in times gone by
have ventured an attack. Inside, scant furniture,
no beds, but hammocks made of ornamental
cotton with long lace fringes swinging in every
room or to the pillars of the court ; the chairs
apparently contrived for giants, with seats of
Spanish leather kept in their place by large brass
nails ; the tables solid and on each of them a
porous jug of water, on the outside of which by
day and night thick drops of moisture hung.
No pictures and no clocks and all the walls inside
dazzling with whitewash, whilst the house itself
— which may, for all I know, have been contrived
by a " conquistador " — shone like a ripe banana,
with a coat of saffron-coloured paint. From
" Azotea " or from " Mirador," across the river,
you saw the " Chaco/' which, with its palms, its
billows of waving Pampa grass, and with its air
of prediluvian impregnability, gave the lie direct
to the sporadic civilisation of the capital of
Paraguay.

The tramway running from the harbour to the
railway station, the " Tolderia " of the Payaguas,
who stalked about in all the glory of their feathers
and polygamy ; the " Correntinos " riding half-
wild horses through the streets ; and yet again the
bank, the post-office, telegraph station and the
steamers in the port, set forth that barbarism and
progress had met and kissed (but out of mere
politeness), and after kissing had drawn apart

12 THE I PANE

again, determined never to be friends. Cave of
Adullam, Club, general meeting-place, give it
what name you will, the Casa Horrocks served
as rendezvous for all those waifs and strays who
in the islands of the Pacific must have been
" Beach Combers," but who in Paraguay, per-
haps restrained by a life on horseback, never
attained to the full meanness of a Pacific Beach
Comber's estate. The Spanish proverb says,
" There is no sane man on a horse's back " —
" No hay hombre cuerdo a caballo " — and it may
well be said no horseman, with the exception of
the jockey now and then, is quite a cur. Riding,
Cervantes says, " makes one man look a gentle-
man and yet another show like a groom " ; but
still the groom himself, by virtue of the company
he keeps, remains more self-respecting than do the
other members of the class who live upon the
follies of mankind. So in the Casa Horrocks was
assembled a heterogeneous crew. Firstly, the
master of the house, together with his Paraguayan
wife, he having left a legally qualified helpmate
in Buenos Ayres, to mourn his loss. Rarest of
types, a clever fat man ; like Falstaff loving meat,
drink, women, comfort, and horses ; a good
musician, a " plum centre shot," capable engineer;
ingenious linguist, having travelled the whole
world over, and eking out Guarani with Turkish,
Spanish, and with Portuguese, and still in such a
manner as to seem rather eclectic than ridiculous.
Lieutenant Hansel, late of the British navy, a

TEE IPANE 13

choleric Celto-Briton, a lo Correntino — that is, in
black merino Turkish trousers, high riding-boots,
vicuna poncho, red silk handkerchief tied round
the neck with the two points neatly spread out
behind upon his shoulders in the same style the
artist's " contadina " was assumed to wear her
headdress in the 'fifties. Like a fire of Vesta was
his short clay pipe, cigar, or cigarette ; impervious
he was to all known fermented drink, nervous by
temperament, and yet with nerves of iron, man-
acled day and night in huge iron spurs, which report
said he wore to prove he had never been a sailor ;
hating " Old Gladstone " as the first Article of
his creed ; Liberal in theory but of the " roaring
forty " breed of Liberals, who in reality are more
Tory than the Tories ; a gentleman withal and
a bold horseman, mixed in his metaphors at times,
as when he spoke of " carrying weather helm "
to characterise a " borer " or described a
" bucker " as having got him in a jabble of a
sea.

Crosskey, a youth caught fresh from College,
and sent to the River Plate in order to acquire
colonial experience, which he appeared to do by
most assiduously frequenting " baUes," " fan-
dangos," " novenas," or any function where the
Paraguayan female population used to congre-
gate. A female population in the ratio of thirteen
to one man, the men having been all killed in the
long, lately terminated, struggle with Brazil.
A war which left the country all but depopulated,

14 THE IPANE

the President himself having been killed when
riding the last horse (a little roan), upon the plains
of the Aquidaban.

Women did everything ; gathered the crops,
tended the flocks, shot, fished, and hunted, and
in some villages the very Alcalde was an old
Indian woman, who, with a European footman's
hat, long cane with silver top, and air of office,
administered such justice as the times required,
to the full as well as had she been properly quali-
fied with beard and University degree. The
national female dress even in ordinary times was
most exiguous : a loose, coarse cotton-shift,
called a tupoi, doing duty for all the pomps and
circumstance which the female form divine seems
to require in richer lands. Being en famille, so
to speak, or at the least en sexe, even the tupoi in
country places was not infrequently held all too
cumbersome, and when a traveller came to a
rancho a general stampede ensued till some one
found the single garment in the place, clothed her-
self in it, and came forth, full of most courteous
salutations, half Spanish and half Guarani, and
a request the stranger would take possession of
" his " house. A Portuguese from Goa known by
the natives as the " English Indian," a Greek
who greased the boots, and an Australian book-
keeper who never kept a book, with numerous
Paraguayan women who seemed to come and go
in a kaleidoscopic fashion and who smoked cigars
as thick as candles all day long, made up the tail

THE I PANE 15

of the establishment. Order and regularity were
things unknown ; meals were served up when
men were hungry, and consisted chiefly of jerked
beef, stewed up with rice and pepper, sprinkled
with mandioca flour, or of a vile concoction known
as " Angou," in which eggs, mandioca, fish, and
general " menavellings " were the ingredients.
Bottles of square-faced gin (Albert Van Hoytema,
the Palm Tree brand) were used as candlesticks.
The heat was like a furnace, and clouds of in-
sects, all most interesting to entomologists,
rendered life one perpetual battle, and proved the
aptness of the Spanish proverb that " eating and
scratching is but to begin." During the day the
horses fed about the streets and in the plaza, and
at evening women led them down to the river to
drink and bathe. The world went on, no doubt,
in Paris and in London as of old, posters appear-
ing in the streets with statements calculated to
deceive the general public writ large upon them.
Empires were struggling for their life. Sedan
and Gravelotte, the Siege of Paris, the Commune,
and the rest of the events of 1870 were going on ;
but we recked nothing of them, taking our recrea-
tion quite contentedly, watching the negro regi-
ment of Brazilians, cantoned outside the town,
perform what it considered drill, looking with
admiration on the squadron of Rio Grandense
cavalry manoeuvre, or on occasion strolling to
the station to see the train come in driven by a
sort of Belgian engineer assisted by two female

2

1 6 TEE I PANE

stokers, naked but for tupois. Right underneath
the Casa Horrocks lay the Brazilian fleet, the
flagship, the Aquidaban, J equitinhonha Paraiba,
Terror do Mondo, and the rest, in the positions
where they had anchored eighteen months ago,
at the surrender of the town. Italian schooners
like that which Garibaldi once commanded, plied
up and down, making the passage to Buenos
Ayres, " aguas abajo " — that is, with the stream
— in twenty days, but taking fifty, sixty, a
hundred, or as many as God willed, "aguas
arriba," or against the stream. Canoes with
Indians came and went, bringing great piles of
oranges, bundles of mandioca, maize, and
" pindo " for the horses, and blending with the
landscape almost as perfectly as the great rafts
of " camalote " which floated with the stream,
gathering in magnitude as they advanced and
carrying with them now and then monkeys and
snakes, and once a tiger, which tradition said
landed at Santa Fe and, walking through the
streets, devoured a Christian. More or less ill-
appointed steamers sailed for Corrientes or for
Corumba, taking the futile merchandise which
Europe " dumps " on countries such as Paraguay ;
and in the cabins a Brazilian Governor journeying
to " Cuyaba," some generals, colonels, a priest
or two, a demi-mondaine changing her garrison,
an orchid-hunter much bemused in gin, and all
the waifs and strays of cosmopolitan humanity
who, " outside our flag," pursue their useless

THE IPANfi 17

lives, under the sixfold international code of law
so neatly codified by Colonel Colt.

A nondescript society which set me thinking
whether if after all Pizarro had not better have
herded swine in the " dehesas " between Truxillo
and Medellin until his death, Almagro kept his
shop in Panama, Cortes continued to make love
and fight in Cuba, and Alvar Nunez have re-
mained in Florida amongst the Seminoles. But
had they done so, perchance America had been
reserved for us and over it our flag had floated
with " Empire," " Pauperism," " Sunday," and
a contingent of the " native " troops from every
State to tramp our streets at the recurrent ten
years' Jubilee.

Pleasant as the spectacle would be of a whole
world taking its speech from Whitechapel, still,
a la tongue, it might become monotonous, and had
it been so, such an assembly as used to meet at
Casa Horrocks could never have been seen.
Somehow or other none of us liked Hartogg ;
perhaps it was his learning, his nationality,
his way of stating what he knew was false, in
such convincing fashion that it seemed more
feasible than truth ; it may have been his Para-
guayan wife, to whom, being an atheist and
violent Bible-smasher, he had been married in a
church, thus losing caste according to our notions,
for, with us, concubinage with " native " women
was an honourable state, but marriage carried
with it something of degradation. In the same

1 8 THE I PANE

fashion I believe in British India that the Briton
thinks no shame to pass an hour or two in amicable
converse with a " native " woman, but thinks
himself disgraced if he promotes the selfsame
woman to the state of mistress. These points
of morals are so nice, so intricate, and so fallacious
that it is well to set them down whilst they exist,
in order that in future generations men may have
subjects to enlarge upon, after the question of the
due relation of the sexes has been pronounced
upon and settled by some County Council, or
other body duly elected on a democratic suffrage,
and therefore competent to deal with matters
such as this in such a way as to be pleasing to the
greatest number of the greatest fools. The
Paraguayan wife was harmless, servile, service-
able, and would have been pretty had she enjoyed
the boon of European birth ; the children well
brought up, labouring by education to supply
deficiency of blood. Strangely enough, and un-
like all philosophers one reads of, Hartogg feared
death. Why, he did not say, perhaps it was from
seeing men so frequently take leave of life upon
short notice. We reasoned with him, striving
to show that death by violence was natural in
Paraguay ; that it was over soon, could not hurt
much, and when got through with, it was ten to
one it was as pleasant as the most orthodox
departure from a bed. In fact, we used the argu-
ments used by the friend who walks beside one
to the dentist's door, and, conscious of the sound-

THE IPANE ig

ness of his teeth, pours all his wit, all his philoso-
phy upon one, and at last departs, leaving one on
the doorstep half irresolute to enter and still
resolved, at any rate, to place a barrier between
oneself and the unseasonable philosopher.

So seated, capping verses, smoking, listening
to Paraguayan " tristes " on the guitar, watching
the fireflies, waiting for the revolution and
the rising of the stream, drinking innumerable
mates, and " making time " in the best way we
could, it came upon us as a relief that Hartogg
had invested in a " Verbal " some fifty leagues
" aguas arriba," and with his wife and children,
books and favourite mule, was soon to start
to take possession of his place upon the steamer
Ipane. I think it struck us all that the reproach
was going to be removed. Why should a man in
Paraguay read books on botany, study the flora
and fauna, write to societies in Gotha, make
plans of things, search for antiquities, collect old
manuscripts, ride like a Neapolitan, lose himself
whenever he went out, and spend his life in useless
| studies when gin, cana, horses, cards, politics,
business, and other things were much more
obvious ?

Of all the miserable and patched-up craft that,
to the imminent danger of their engineers, plied
j in asthmatic fashion on the Paraguay, the Ipane
\ was worst. Condemned in Buenos Ayres,
i bought for a song by an Italian for the Para-
guayan trade, broken down a hundred times,

20 TEE IPANti

engines a mass of rust, pipes served with rope-
yarn, cylinders doubtful, paddles with half the
floats long broken from running upon sand-banks,
smoke-stack stayed on the one side with a rusty
chain and on the other with a raw-hide rope,
paint cracked, the glass of half the scuttles gone,
the seams of decks gaping like cat-fish in a
drought, her single wretched quarter-boat used
as a hencoop, the Ipane was known from Santa
Fe to Cuyaba as the most perfect death-trap in
the trade. Sensible engineers — these chiefly
Scotchmen who had drifted borne by the north-
east trade of whiskey which sets out of Greenock
and takes a Scotchman round the world, leaving
him sometimes weather- (or whiskey-) bound in
Paraguay — had long forsaken her, the last remark-
ing with an o^th that, blast him ! he would never
undertake again to navigate " a blamed revolving
scrap-heap." Basques and Italians, Swedes and
Norwegians, one and all, had left declaring that
the partition betwixt the Ipane and hell was far
too thin for them. But as a fool or wise man (for
the result places him in his proper category)
always turns up for such a job, a stranded stage-
coach driver who once had worked a donkey-
engine in Bahia Blanca stepped into the breach,
and with a crew of negroes, Neapolitans, Indians,
and an Irish fireman, used to force the Ipane
from Asuncion to Corumba, running the pressure
up to a hundred pounds an inch instead of the
forty which her clattering engines tested to sixty

THE I PANE 21

might have borne with tolerable ease. So to this
Argo, made as clean as holystone and paint laid
on the night before could make her, we all turned
out to escort the German Argonauts about to
sail.

A curious appearance we must have made with
Horrocks on an enormous horse riding like a
Silenus at the head, dressed all in white, decked in
a " jipi japa " hat and patent leather riding-boots,
on the legs of which the Paraguayan eagle flapped
his wings, embroidered in red silk. The rest
dressed chiefly in the Correntino style except the
Consuls, of which Asuncion boasted a mighty
store, and the apothecary, also a German, to-
gether with a German captain in the Brazilian
fleet ; these last in European clothes, to which
the Germans added spectacles, as being the hall-
mark of their nationality. Hartogg, his wife and
children, came in a bullock-cart drawn by two
apocalyptic oxen, conducted by a Paraguayan
who, clad in white and with a red " bayeta "
cloak over one arm, sat on the yoke and beat the
oxen on the horns with a stout wooden mallet,
or, jumping off, prodded them lustily with a long
cane, pouring a torrent of continuous blasphemy
in Guarani upon the unoffending beasts. Lastly
a negro led a mule, the only animal tradition said
that Hartogg dared to ride, for as he said " the
mule is by so much the most damnable of all
the beasts that I prefer him, for when he throws
you off he also kicks the men that catch him, in

22 THE IPANE

the stomach, with his feet." Cocktails discussed,
the passengers aboard, the mule secured close to
the windlass, the wretched steamer, after the
boiler duly " primed " upon the lookers-on, got
under way, and heaving, rattling, with a noise
below as of a thousand rusty chains, staggered
into mid-stream, fired off her green brass gun, and
dipped her flag as% she passed underneath the
stern of the Brazilian flagship, sweltering at
anchor in the blazing sun. Hartogg, after a
hurried leavetaking, leaned upon the rail, and the
last sight of him alive was his square German face,
red nose and bushy beard, bent shoulders, and
greasy alpaca coat, as, holding a child in one fat
hand, he waved his black straw hat and shouted
out, " Atios hasda odra vez."

The cavalcade returned to town racing along
the sandy half-deserted streets, rushing through
clumps of castor-oil bushes, " pechando " — that
is, riding their horses " breast on " upon their
neighbours, trying to unhorse each other by
putting a foot under the nearest rider's foot,
stooping and picking up handfuls of the red sand
to throw in one another's eyes, and, galloping
to the Casa Horrocks, drew up with a jerk, and
each man after hobbling his horse got off to mix
a cocktail and to drink success to Hartogg and his
' Yerbal," whilst the opinion seemed to be that
for a German and a fool, Hartogg was not so bad
a fellow as he looked. Over a cocktail in Asuncion
time soon slips by, and whilst the horses hung

THE IPANE 23

their heads outside, hobbled and hitched to posts,
day faded tropically into night no twilight inter-
vening, and as the company sat talking in broken
Spanish so that all might understand a little of
what was said, a sound of lamentation rose from
the port and spread through every street of the
half-peopled town. Rockets shot up, lights
flashed in the Brazilian squadron, steam-launches
came and went, and from the Camp, Rio Gran-
dense orderlies rushed past towards the port,
their horses flying through the black Paraguayan
night as they were horses of the Walkyrie. Down
at the port the loafer, without whose presence no
port in any land is quite complete, imparts the
news. About ten miles above the town a rapid
known as " the Pass " ran strongly, the current
sweeping through it at the rate of seven knots.
In trying to surmount the difficulty the old
machinery had failed, the boiler burst, and
Hartogg and some dozen passengers been killed.
The loafer seemed to see the hand of God in the
calamity, for, with some quite unnecessary oaths,
he told us that the mule when blown into the
water had emerged upon an island, in which he
saw that God had not been willing that such a
good " sobre paso " beast should die. On the
gun-deck of the Brazilian flagship the survivors
were laid out, wrapped all in cotton- wool, livid
and horrible, and looking like so many scalded
pigs, and gasping] their lives out tortured by
mosquitoes and by heat.

24 TEE IPANE

Amongst them Hartogg, just at point of death,
conscious and cynical, scalded so horribly as to
be all one wound. Beside him stood his wife and
children quite unharmed ; Brazilian sailors
gathered in groups, all weeping, for a negro soon
is moved to tears ; doctors went to and fro with
ice and bandages, ostensibly to aid, but really
studying the cases, and as pleased as vivisectors
when they hit upon some curious way of giving
useless pain. A priest prepared his tackling, and
stood by ready to hear confession, soothe the mind,
and give the soul its passport into bliss.

Then Hartogg beckoned feebly to his wife,
and said in Spanish, " Your good God is careless ;
let the priest bless me, it will do you good ; I am
glad the mule is safe — it must have been a true
believer all the time. Adios, God is great, but
inconsiderate/' Then stretching out his miser-
able hand towards the frightened children he
expired, and the scared priest advancing signed
the atheist's body with the cross.

Out towards Lambare, along a narrow, deep-
cut road, planted with orange and " paraiso "
trees, ruinous but yet walled in with mouldering
Tapia walls, is situate the " Cement erio Protes-
tante," where Germans, Englishmen, atheists,
and those who die outside the Christian faith
in Paraguay are suffered to remain, until the
armadillos dig them up.

There all the sojourners at Casa Horrocks
brought Hartogg's body in a bullock-cart, stretch-

THE IPANE 25

ed on an open bier, and with his snub red nose,
looking more like a radish than in life, emerging
from the flowers which served to hide the horrid
marks upon his face. Some sort of " dust to dust"
and pistol-firing, snorting of horses ; and, whilst
they lowered the body with lazos into the sandy
grave, a glass fell from the clothes, and as his
youngest daughter picked it up she smiled, re-
marking that she thought it must be one of the
glasses of "el microsposio de papa."

UN PELADO

NOT far from where the Old Comanche Trail
crosses the Nueces lies the little town of
Encinal in Western Texas, county of La Salle,
upon the International and Great Northern Rail-
way track. A little one-horse place, just where
the " post oak " country touches the great open
but mesquite-covered prairies of the south. Oak
forests to the north, oak and more oak, as " post
oak," " black jack," " live oak," with hickory,
pecan, red bud and hackleberry ; bottoms rich
and aluvial in which grow cotton ; " bayous "
alive with alligators ; woods, woods, and still
more woods, right up to Texarcana, on by Naco-
doches, and from thence to Little Rock and the
Hot Springs upon the Arkansas. To the south
the prairies stretching to the Rio Grande, once
open grassy seas, when the Comanches and
Lipanes burnt them every spring, as sheep farmers
in Scotland fire the heather, but now all over-
grown with chaparral,* composed of dwarf

* Chaparral, from chaparro, a dwarf oak, has come to mean
in Mexico and Texas any underwood or scrub.

26

UN PELADO 27

mesquite and sweet flowering guisache, low-grow-
ing ahuehuete intermixed with cactus, till nearing
the great river, the very Nile of North America,
all vegetation ceases, and salt plains replace the
scrub-grown prairie, and at last even the salt
grass vanishes and a stone-covered sandy waste
serves as a barrier between the rival States.

The town itself a Helot amongst cities, and con-
trived, apparently, to fill the double object of
showing what a town should never be and of
example to the world at large of how much uglier
a modern mushroom town can be than an en-
campment of the Diggers or the Utes. Frame-
houses made in the North, then numbered in
pieces and railed South, and put together like a
Chinese puzzle, shingles for roofing, and each
dwelling raised on blocks after the fashion of a
haystack. No shade, no trees, except a straggling
China tree or two in the sand waste known as the
Plaza. A tramway running down the thorough-
fare called Constitution Street. A coloured
Baptist church, a second Presbyterian ditto, and
the cathedral, half of adobe* and half of " rock,"
conveyed at great expense from Goliad by the
members of the Pioneer faith, as Roman Catholics
are styled in Texas. Three bar-rooms known as
" saloons," a bank, some stores, in which all kinds
of notions, from " ladies' fixings " down to waggon
grease and coal oil, were on sale, and where hung
" quirts," Mexican bits and horse-hair reins, with

* Sun-dried brick.

28 UN PELADO

" cinches," Winchesters and white-handled pistols
for cowboys on the spree. Before each house a
horse tied by a lariat and saddled with a high-
peaked saddle, with a rifle hanging to the horn,
stood sleepily.

Horses in every street, in every yard, in wag-
gons, buggies, hacks ; mares hitched to Milburn
waggons, with foals running at their feet. Horses
asleep right in the middle of the Plaza ; horses
that strayed about like dogs in an Oriental town
and seemed to have no owner ; some tied to posts,
apparently asleep, till an incautious stranger
passed too near, when, with a squeal, they
bounded from the ground and stretched their
lariats quite taut, till the strain slackening they
plunged against the post, like boats left at a stair
and bumping on the steps as the waves rise and
fall.

Nothing aesthetic in the whole town, and still
the people not without the attraction that energy
imparts. " Cleargritted " to a man, shooting
" plum centre," riding a " pitching " horse as
they were Indians, free-swearers, proof against
all kinds of drink, not civilised and yet not savages,
voting the Democratic ticket straight, and deter-
mined to uphold what they thought justice,
especially when " niggers," Mexicans, or Indians
transgressed their code.

Across the creek straggled the quarter of the
Mexicans known as Chihuahua. Entering its
purlieus, one came upon another world. The

UN PELADO 29

houses either made of adobes, or else mere huts,
a cross between an Indian " wickey-up " and a
Mexican " jacal," were made, as nests of prairie
dogs are made, of everything that came to hand.
Kerosene-tins and hides, sides of stage-coaches,
ends of railway cars, with all the wreckage of a
prairie town, were used in their make up. Still
they seemed adequate for men in blankets to
lounge against and plan what they could steal.
Wrapped in " scrapes," overshadowed by
" Poblano " hats, their feet encased in high-
heeled riding-boots, and in their eyes a look of
half good-natured villainy, the population stood
confessed a rogue. Few worked, all owned a
horse, a game-cock, and every self-respecting
man on feast-days went to play monte in a build-
ing lettered " Restoran and Koffe." So Encinal
sat facing its suburb, the two destined, like man
and wife, never to understand each other's
motives though living side by side. In Encinal
the people, go-ahead commercial men, but yet
idealists like all the members of the Celto-Saxon
race, determined to deceive and be deceived on all
those points which the uneducated and slothful
Mexicans in the suburb of Chihuahua perceived
quite clearly and acted on like true materialists.
In Encinal, Sunday, with all its horrors of closed
shops, the " bell punch " in the bar-rooms, and an
air of gloom congealed the town like a black frost
at each week's end. Across the creek it was a
holiday, with cock-fights, races, and an air of

30 UN PELADO

merriment which in itself went far towards aton-
ing for the past week's villainy. On one side,
moral citizens, under cover of the night, slipped
when they could up to the " Mansions,"
mysterious, strongly fenced in, and solitary
houses on the bluff which all the day looked
dreary and deserted, and by night were all lit
up, and flared with the electric light, which of
course found its way to Encinal whilst Paris,
London, and Berlin still clung to gas. But still
these stealers to the " Mansions " in the dark,
were moral men, because on Sunday they all sat
in church ejaculating Hallelujah or joining in
the responses audibly, according to their creed.

No one was moral in Chihuahua, or made the
least pretence to be. If men disliked their wives,
they took another to help them bear their cross ;
and if a wife found that her husband treated her
unkindly, she too looked round and cast her eyes
upon some able-bodied unconnected man to help
her bear her woes. Still, in Chihuahua the women
understood woman's first duty — that is, to be a
woman — more clearly than the elliptic print-
clothed " females " or elaborately arrayed " white
ladies " in the town of Encinal.

But as mankind is ever wont to typify, making
the virtues feminine, the vices (if I mistake not)
male, calling the Spaniard proud, the Italian
treacherous, the Frenchman fickle, and so on,
and understanding best what a town, country,
race, or what not, is like by summing up his,

UN PELADO 31

their, or its characteristics in some man, I do the
same.

Therefore, I take Jose Maria Mendiola and G. M.
Hodges as prototypes, both of Chihuahua and of
Encinal. The one a Mexican, working at what is
called " freight hauling " in the United States,
that is what we should style a waggoner. The
other " Station Agent/' and a keeper of a local
store. Both rogues, but different in degree, and
each unable to discover any taint of virtue in the
other's life.

Jose Maria, long, brown and thin, his lank
black hair showing his Indian blood, his furtive
eye and nervous hands all proving him to be what
the Americans, for reasons not explained, refer
to as a " Greaser."

Hodges, a " real white man," fresh-coloured
with the sandy hair and clear blue eyes which
mark the man destined by Providence to keep a
shop.

Just how the thing " kim round," as Texans
say, no one was ever sure.

Some say that Hodges cheated Mendiola about
a pistol, and others that Jose had swindled Hodges
about some bill. That which is certain is, that in
full day Jose Maria " filled Hodges up " with
bullets from a Winchester that he had borrowed
from the man he shot. Sheriff McKinney of
Cotulla took the murderer, and twelve citizens,
all in due course, brought in the verdict " murder
in the first degree."

3

32 UN PELADO

What follows, the reporter of the San Antonio
Evening Light shall tell.

" Justice in Encinal : conviction against Jose
Maria Mendiola, one of the Mendiolas of La Salle,
a low-down crowd of ' Greasers/ located between
Costulla and Encinal.

" The victim's brother travels from Jackson-
ville to see Jose turned off, says that he guesses
he would have come ten thousand miles to see the
man who shot poor Gus buck in a horsehair rope.
He complains of the accommodation in the
' sleepers ' on the third section of the ' doodle-
bug,' and remarks he guessed he almost lost the
' round up ' after all, as ' road agents ' held up the
car in which he travelled, at the long switch in the
' perara ' outside Vermillionville. After a drink
I started out to interview ' our Mary,' as you
might call Jose Maria. Found him quite chipper,
mighty peart, and sassy as an Indian pony on
the young grass, smoking a loud cigar. Maria
allows that he was raised at Las Moras, Kinney
County, Texas. Has no record of his birth, but
guesses he is twenty-five. Was reared in Western
Texas and says : ' I have always lived there,
never lived nowhere else. I have never wanted
to live anywhere else. No wife (sabe), therefore
no children to mourn for me. Old man and
mother still both living near Encinal ; sisters,
brothers, two or three will see me die. I reckon
they will also see I am not afraid to die.'

"As he said this, he drew his blanket (called

UN PELADO 33

it a scrape) round his shoulders and shivered, for
it was a mighty piercing norther, and he was
dressed like most ' Pelados '* in cotton fixings,
all except his blanket.

" ' Yes, sefior ; I have no trade, but little
education, speaky no English. Understand him ?
Yes. All my life I have been a hauler, with a
mule- waggon.'

" ' Home influences ? '

" ' No, sefior ; very poor Mexican. Have
drunk some mezcal — not very much — too much.
Yes, I killed Hodges ; he took my ivory-handledt
pistol. He swindled me, and I shot him.

" ' What do I think of my sentence ?

" ' There is no justice in it. If there was any
justice anywhere they would not take my life
on the thing they are building out there. All
the proceedings were in English. I did not under-
stand a word. They told me I was to be hung.
I said " Bueno " Curse your Corregidors ;
curse your Courts ! No, I am not religious ;
born a Roman Catholic, but am a Universalist ;
think all religions should get a fair show. That
saw and hammer go all day, only at night I get
some rest. Sabe, eh ? They finished the scaffold
and pulled it down again because it was not quite

* A Pelado is a poor Mexican, literally " stripped."

t It is the ambition of every Texan and most Mexicans to
own either an ivory-handled or a mother-of-pearl handled
pistol. It gratifies them just as much as a baronetcy does a
successful sweater, and is more readily compassed by the
poor in spirit.

34 UN PELADO

level. Oh, these Americans ; what does it matter
if it was level or not ? Even the earth is not quite
level, for a poor man, very poor Mexican/

" This let me out [remarks the talented reporter]
and I lit for the Maverick House, and after some
' Rock and Rye/ sat down to think about what
I had heard. I allow that Mendiola was, like
most picayune ' Greasers/ really a fatalist,
reckoned he had a Kismet or a something which
predestined him to do the deed. Anyhow, he
is not the first citizen of La Salle who has gone up
the golden stair with the assistance of a half-inch
rope.

" Back at the Maverick House — all over now.
Jose Maria just turned off. He looked pale, but
showed grit, and in a neat-fitting black suit
(Dollar Store cut) made an elegant appearance.
One of the most singular features of the whole
show was that there was little swearing or ribaldry
amongst the crowd ; even the Aztecs, who had
turned out in force, some coming from Carrizo
Springs, the night before, and camping in the
Plaza, seeming not much excited. Father Kos-
biel, a Polander, had ' corpse ' in charge. Jose
stood mighty quiet, and as the City Marshal
finished reading the warrant, slightly shrugged
his shoulders and said ' Muy bien/ The reverend
father then performed the offices for the de-
ceased, and turning to the people said : ' Citizens
of Encinal and of Cotulla, this poor Mexican, who
stands beside me, will shortly stand before his

UN PELADO 35

God. He asks your pardon, and regrets that he
can speak no English so as to express to you that
he is penitent, but he humbly asks for the sym-
pathy of all men as one about to die.' The
reverend father seemed much overcome, but
Mendiola remained unmoved, and merely saying,
' Adios, Padre/ stepped on the scaffold, and in an
instant was jerked into eternity. ' Dead/ said
the physician, ' in four minutes.' The people
gossiped awhile, unhitched their horses, and then
dispersed. I guess Maria Mendiola was a stupid
animal, but he showed ' clear grit ' right to the
end. Father Kosbiel says he died a Catholic,
and that the manner of his going showed his trust
in God. Dunno, guess he said he was a Universal-
ist, but any way he seemed the least concerned
of the whole outfit, and looked as if he would be
thankful when the affair was done."

Thus far the reporter, but an aged settler, as
the shavings flew from his pocket-knife and
whittling stick pronounced the epitaph : —

" No sense at all," said he, turning towards the
nearest saloon ; " just didn't have no sense at
all. Like killing a goat, didn't have sense enough
to be afraid."

UN ANGELITO

ALL day we had been riding over the south
" campo " of the prairie of Buenos
Ayres, between the mountains of Tandil and
where the trail which led to Bahia Blanca crosses
the Tres Arroyos.

It seemed that never had our " tropilla "
given so much trouble to drive ; still it was well
selected, both as to colour and general undesira-
bility to ride. The mare was brown and white,
the foal which followed her, lemon and white
with four black feet, the horses black and white,
all with their manes well hogged after the Gaucho
fashion, leaving a lock upon the withers by which
to mount ; and all in such condition that one
could have counted money on their backs — two of
them were neither tame nor wild ; two neither
wild nor tame ; two but half broken (medio
bagualon), one difficult to mount, another almost
impossible to catch, and when caught, worth
nothing but to fasten to a stake at night to drive
the others up on, in the morning ; and one but

36

UN ANGELITO 37

fitted, as the Gauchos say, to make a perch for a
wild bird.

The suffocating north wind blew hot and
fatiguing as the Hamsin. On every side a sea of
grass, grass and more grass ; " paja y cielo "
(grass and sky), as the natives of the country
style their favourite landscape.

Nothing to break the brown eternity of the
Pampa but here and there a green ombu, shaped
like an umbrella, or an occasional straggling line
of Pampa grass, which marked the edges of some
watercourse, and by comparison seemed as tall
as does a poplar in the plains of Lombardy.

An ostrich now and then scudded across our
path, with wings spread out to catch the wind, like
a ship running down the North-East Trades.

Sometimes a Patagonian hare sprang from the
grass and lurched, apparently quite slowly, out
of sight.

In the district we were crossing, all the rivers
salt, and, though as clear as crystal, bitter as gall.
The rare travellers, seen from afar, almost hull
down like ships upon the sea, grew by degrees
larger as they approached, and hat, and poncho,
and then saddle and horse came into sight.

When they drew near, they drove their horses
all together, and coming forward, riding from side
to side, holding their pistol or " facon/'* ad-

* A " facon " is a long knife which serves either to eat
with or to cut a man's throat (in the slang of the Pampas,
" hacer la obra santa ").

38 UN ANGELITO

vanced, halted a stone-throw off, shouting their
salutations. If all seemed right, they then
advanced and asked for news about the Indians ;
for all the country had been laid waste, the houses
burnt, men killed, and women and cattle carried
off, about a week before.

It usually appeared that the next house — that
is, the one the traveller had left three leagues
behind — was smouldering, the body of the owner
lying before the door, swollen to the dimensions
of an ox, and festering in the sun.

We in our turn related how at the " puesto "
five leagues away, close to the pass of the Quequen
Salado, we had seen a woman's body hanging
naked to a post, and decorated with leaves torn
from a Bible skewered artistically about it where
decency required.

With mutual recommendations to have pru-
dence, to beware of smokes,* to ride with care, to
get off at the little hills which break the Pampa
into inequalities, and crawling up to scan the
horizon well before descending, we separated with
a fallacious " Go with God," knowing full well
our only trust was in our spurs.

Not quite the sort of time that any one would
choose to sleep out on the open " camp."

Towards evening we reached what in those
countries is called by courtesy, a fort — that is,
it had been once a fort, and therefore had a shallow

* The Indians signal to one another by the smoke of fires.

UN ANGELITO 39

ditch all round it, and a flat roof, on which re-
posed a rusty cannon, choking the embrasure.

Around the fort a grove of peaches, known as
the " Monte/' straggled and furnished a fruit,
hard as a turnip, but esteemed a delicacy upon the
plains.

A strong corral of posts of nandubay, all bound
together with strips of hide, and a " palenque "
— that is, a post to fasten horses to — formed the
outworks to the place.

The " palenque " marks the boundary to which
the wayfaring man, if not a fool, may safely
venture on his horse.

To pass beyond it uninvited, especially at
night, exposes one to the chance of a casual shot,
or at the least to the assaults of a pack of dogs
which seize your horse's tail.

Your caballero leaves his horses some way off,
and rides up slowly, and still sitting on his horse,
calls " Ave Maria ! " in a loud voice, to which the
owner answers, " Sin pecado concebida," and
invites him to get off.

Religion and politeness being thus satisfied,
the traveller dismounts, ties up his horse, enters
the kitchen, and sits down on a horse's head beside
the fire.

The quantity of saddled horses standing out-
side the house portended something of an un-
usual kind.

To the " palenque," to the wheels of bullock-
carts, to posts in corral, to tufts of grass, to

40 UN ANGELITO

bones half-buried in the ground, stood horses
tied.

Every variety of the piebald race was there —
" overo negro/' " alazan overo," " entrepelado,"
" overo porcelano," " azulejo," with " tuviano "
and " yaguane " — they all were there, looking as
bright and variegated as is a bed of tulips in the
setting sun.

Some of them merely hobbled by the forefeet,
and weighted down with silver bridles, with heavy
" cups " on either side of the mouth, with silver
reins seven feet in length tied back upon the
saddles, making them arch their necks like rock-
ing-horses ; the saddles silver-mounted, silver
their " fiadores " and " pretales," silvered so to
speak, like clippers, to the bends ; the very rings
which formed the buckles of their broad hide
girths being of heavy plate. Others, again, were
saddled with an old " recado," not worth a dollar
(even of Bolivia) ; a sheepskin on the top, the
stirrups merely knots of hide made to be caught
between the naked toes. These last sat back on
their " Cabrestos " and snorted as you passed
them, causing their owners to rush hurriedly from
out of the house to see if there was danger of
their saddles disappearing, and then to mutter,
when the horse was quieted, that he was " medio
redomon " (that is, but mounted a few times),
" for the accursed infidel had taken all the tame
horses and left the ' pago ' upon foot." It puzzled
me to think why after an invasion of the Indians

UN ANGELITO 41

so many people had come to visit my acquaint-
ance, Eustaquio Medina, known also as Eusta-
quio el Tejon.

Soon he came out and welcomed me, asking
me to dismount, hobble my mare, and carefully
tie up a horse, remarking that in the times we
lived Christians should take precautions and
always live prepared.

The flesh, the devil, and the world were not the
things against which Eustaquio thought a true
believer should prepare — at least I think so —
for, if he ever thought about such matters, he
judged most likely it was the business of his
priest to shield him from the devil ; the world in
the Pampas is not too distracting to the mind,
and for the flesh he made no struggle, thinking
that that which God had made, must of necessity
be good for man.

After most minute inquiries after the health of
all my family, of whom he knew no member, he
said —

" We have ' un angelito ' in our poor house
— that is, his body ; for his soul is with the blest.1'

The conscious pride of being, as it were, in
direct touch with heaven itself had caused him
to forget his grief for his son's death. No people
upon earth can be more absolutely material than
the Gauchos of the Pampa, yet one is just as safe
amongst them, even in a bargain, as amongst
those who analyse their motives and find a
spiritual explanation for the basest of their deeds.

42 UN ANGELITO

Amusements, except ostrich-hunting, cattle-
marking, with racing, and others of a nature in
which it is not easy for women to participate,
are scarce. When a child dies it is the signal for
a dance to celebrate its entrance into bliss.

If the Christian faith was really held by any-
body in its entirety, this custom would not be
solely to be observed amongst the Gauchos.
As it is, humanity in almost every other country
rises superior even to faith, that first infirmity of
uninstructed minds.

So in a long, low room lit by a score of candles,
made in tin-moulds, and smoking blackly, were
assembled some fifty people, Gauchos, estancieros,
a Basque or two, and the ubiquitous Italian with
his organ, who in those days used to pervade
the Pampa from the Arroyo del Pabon to
Tapalquen.

The women, known as " Chinas " (Chinese),
though none knows why or wherefore, did not err
much upon the score of great expenditure in
dress — a cotton gown, apparently in many cases
their only garment, except their shift — sat, when
not dancing, in rows on chairs along the wall,
like swallows on a telegraph-wire, waiting as
patiently for any man to hire them as the eleventh-
hour labourers in Holy Writ.

The " Angelito," dressed in his best clothes,
sat in a chair upon a table, greenish in colour,
and with his hands and feet hanging down
limply — horrible, but at the same time fascinat-

UN ANGELITO 43

ing. Over his head a cheap Italian lithograph
of the Madonna hung by a strip of hide from a
deer's horn stuck into the wall. On either side
a pious and frightful German print, one of the
Prodigal amongst his swine, another flanking it
setting him forth in better circumstances, seated
in pomp between two German ladies, monstrously
fair and fat.

Just underneath the " Angelito " sat an old
" Gaucho " playing the guitar with the fatuous
air with which musicians in countries such as
South America invest their trade. Two or three
men of the richer classes, as their silver-handled
knives and spurs made plain, smoked in a knot
apart ; whilst in a corner sat some old men
talking of horses' marks, and illustrating any
difficulty by " painting " the mark in question
on the table with their finger dipped in gin.

The younger people danced " habaneras,"
" el cielito," the " gato," " manguri," or one of
those slow valses with much balancing of hips
affected by the South Americans. Evidently
they had been drinking to the fair passage of
the new angel into the realms of bliss. Above
the rasping music the rattle of the dancers'
spurs was heard, and now and then the man at
the guitar broke into a shrill falsetto song, in
which the company took part. Stretched on a
catre lay a man wrapped in his poncho, with a
deep lance-wound in the groin, given by an Indian
a few days before. To keep his blood in order

44 UN ANGELITO

and heal his wound he ate great pieces of beef
cooked in the hide, and smoked incessantly.

On passing opposite the body the girls occasion-
ally snatched loose their hands from the clutches
of their partners and crossed themselves, and then,
as if ashamed of thus indulging in a religious
exercise in public, broke into laughter.

Why the presence of a child's body, even if its
soul is with the blessed, should set on folk to
dance passes my comprehension. Yet so it is,
and a commercial element has crept into the
scheme.

At the country stores, called " pulperias " in
Buenos Ayres, sometimes the owner will beg or
buy the body of a child just dead to use it as an
" Angelito " to attract the country people to a
revel at his store.

The pulperia is the Pampa Club, news, calumny
and scandal take their rise in it, and there resort
all the elite of frontier ruffianism.

One says as naturally, " What do they say at
the pulperia ? " as in England, " What is the news
at such and such a club, or on the Stock Ex-
change ? " An " Angelito " stored in a cool,
dark room to keep him from the flies, and then
brought out at night to grace a sort of Agapemone,
shows past and present linked together in a way
which argues wonders, when they both make way
for that unfathomable future, the fitting paradise
for unimaginative men. From where the custom
came, whether from Europe or from the Indians,

UN ANaELITO 45

or if in some form or another it is to be observed
in every nation, that I cannot tell : one thing I
know, that in the Pampa of Buenos Ayres it and
all other customs of a like kind are doomed to
disappear.

A cultivated prairie cut into squares by barbed
wire fences, riddled with railings and with the
very sky shaped into patterns by the crossing
lines of telegraphs, may be an evidence, for all I
know, of progress ; but of all that which makes a
Pampa what the Indians imagined it when they
gave the plains the name — for Pampa in the
Indian tongue signifies the " space " — no traces
will be left.

The semi-nomad horsemen will have vanished ;
the Indians have gone within my memory,
leaving, though savages, by their disappearance a
blank in the world more difficult to fill than if the
works of all the Greeks had vanished into air.

The Gaucho will go next, the ostriches and the
huanacos ; little by little the plants of Europe,
those parasitic prostitutes the nettle and the
thistle, which follow us to every climate, will
usurp the place of native and more congenial
kinds.

His will will be accomplished who, having made
the earth a paradise, gave it to us to turn into a
purgatory for ourselves and all the dwellers in it.

In this monotony of mud and stucco, through
the noise of cabs, of railways and the multi-
tudinous sounds which rob the dweller in a city of

46 UN ANGELITO

any power of hearing, such as wild people have,
I sometimes see my " Angelito " seated in his
chair, and wonder in what kind of heaven he is.
Often I have assisted at a " velorio," and done
my best to honour the return of some small angel
to his native land. Yet this first occasion on the
Tres Arroyos still remains most firmly printed in
my mind. Eustaquio Medina, the wounded man
lying smoking on his catre, the decomposing
" Angelito " in his chair, his mother looking at
nothing with her eyes wide open, and the wild
music of the cracked guitar seem to revisit me.

Lastly, the Pampa stretching away like a great
inland sea, silent and bluish under the southern
stars ; and rising from it, the mysterious noises
of the desert which, heard and comprehended,
appeal to us in the same fashion as the instinct
calling them north or south, stirs migratory birds.

THE LAZO

THE lazo is of great antiquity. It is said
to be depicted in the ruins of Nineveh.
An early Persian manuscript, preserved in the
Escorial, shows a sportsman (whom I suppose
royal by his Olympian expression and careless
seat) in the act of catching a wild ass with a
nicely plaited rope. The monarch bestrides a
rather stocky-looking, dark-coloured horse, with
four white feet and a white face. A bow, quiver
and a sabre are hung from his saddle, and a sort
of housing half covers the horse. How the wild
ass is to be restrained, even by the hand of a
monarch, is not at first sight evident, for the lazo
is neither fixed to the saddle after the fashion of
the Gauchos, nor is a half-turn taken round the
pommel, in the style adopted by Vaqueros in
Mexico and Texas. Apart from this detail, all is
as realistically set forth as it would be to-day in a
photograph. The horse bears away from the
beast lazoed, and the king sits a little to one side,
exactly as a Texan Cowboy or an Argentine
Gaucho sits under similar circumstances. Irises

47 4

48 THE LAZO

and narcissi spring up under the horse's feet, and
an applauding group of angels peep out of a cloud,
whilst in the middle distance another Persian
Gaucho shoots an antelope with an arrow whilst
galloping at full speed.

One could have wished that the lazo had been
depicted nearer to the ass's head, for hanging as
it does, just on the withers, the line of most
resistance (so dear to monarchs) has evidently
been adopted.

The Laplanders are said to lazo their reindeer,
and the Tartars and modern Australians use a
rudimentary lazo fixed to a long pole in order to
catch wild or refractory horses. The Poles,
Croatians, and Wallachians, with the Hungarians,
seem to have used the lazo till about the beginning
of the present century. A picture by the German
artist, Richter, shows Polish remounts for the
German cavalry being lazoed in the Zwinger at
Dresden. The horses look as wild as a Texan
" bronco "* or an Argentine " bagual,"t and the
attitude of men and animals, and the way the
ropes are coiled and thrown, are identical with
those adopted in Spanish America to-day. The
lazo appears to run through a ring in the pommel
of the saddle.

* Bronco = rough or untamed.

t Bagual in the Argentine Provinces is sometimes used for
a wild and sometimes for a half-tamed horse. The word is
of Quichua origin, and is said to have been originally
44 Cahual," and to have been a corruption of the word
" Caballo."

THE LAZO 49

It is, however, in Spanish America where the
art has been most developed. This is on account
of the open country and the vast numbers of wild
and semi- wild horses which, up to the middle of
the present century overspread its plains. The
lazo may be said to have two great schools : one
the style adopted in the Argentine Republic,
and the other what may be called the school of
Mexico. The Argentine Gaucho and the Brazilian
of the province of Rio Grande use a raw-hide lazo,
plaited generally in four till within about eight or
ten feet of the end, where the plaiting is usually
of six, eight, or ten strands, as fancy leads. The
lazo terminates in a strong iron ring, which is
spliced into the hide so as to remain stiff, and stick
out in a straight line from the rope. At the end
kept in the hand or attached to the saddle a
Turk's head and plaited loop form the finishing.
The thickness of the lazo is about that of the little
finger, and the hide is kept soft and pliable by
frequent applications of grease, for which purpose
a piece of raw mutton fat is found to answer best.
The Indians use mare's grease, but bacon, oil,
or any salted grease is said to burn the hide. To
make a lazo the hide of a cow is procured, denuded
of hair, and the various strands are softened,
either by beating with a mallet or being run
through an iron ring, or worked between a piece
of split wood (called a " Mordaza "). When
properly softened, the inside of the hide is as
white as flour, and, if well cared for, will last soft

5o THE LAZO

for many years. The ordinary length of an
Argentine lazo is about sixty-six feet, though
exceptionally tall and powerful men sometimes
use lazos of eighty and even ninety feet in length.
A skilful man on foot will catch a horse in a
corral at the distance of ten or twelve yards,
throwing at the neck. At ten yards he will
secure the two fore feet, or a fore and a hind foot,
both hind feet, or, catching the animal round the
neck, will, by imparting a vibratory motion to the
rope, place a half-hitch round the nose, thus
forming what is called a " medio bozal," or half-
halter. To catch the feet is called " pialar "
from pie, a foot. The effect of catching by the
feet is to throw the animal violently to the ground.
Catching round the neck chokes the animal to the
ground, if enough force is used. In either case,
the moment the lazo tightens, the lazoer throws
himself back on the rope, like a seaman hauling
on a sheet, and, digging his heels into the ground,
bears heavily on the rope with his left hand, which
he puts as far behind his back as possible. The
strain is most severe, cutting the unaccustomed
hand and destroying the clothes, so that in many
cases a leather apron is worn to keep off the chafe.
A strong colt of five years old will drag three or
four men round a corral, if they try to stop him by
sheer strength, and the lazo be not tightened high
on the neck near the ears ; but a boy of sixteen,
used to the work, by watching his opportunity,
will easily stop the same animal.

THE LAZO 51

To throw a long lazo, height is of great advant-
age, as, other things being equal, a tall man can
throw a longer lazo than a man of low stature.
The lazo is prepared for throwing by making a
noose from two and half to four yards in circum-
ference at the ring end of the rope. The ring
should be slipped down to about a third of the
circumference of the noose. The remainder of the
rope is coiled, and two or three coils taken into
the right hand together with the noose ; the rest
of the coils are held in the left hand. Care must
be observed not to leave too much slack rope
between the coils in the right and left hands, as it
is apt to get entangled when the lazo leaves the
hand, especially on horseback. Swinging the
noose as many times round the head as is required
to give the sufficient momentum, and taking care
that the noose flies open and with a slight up-
ward inclination, it is then let go, rather than
thrown, when the hand is just above the head on
the right side, and slides through the air, uncoiling
as it flies.

Like throwing a fly, putting screw on a ball
at billiards, and taking a close counter of carte,
it is an art not easily described, and best learnt by
demonstration and by practice.

To become a perfect lazoer (the Spanish word
is enlazador), the lazo must have been familiar
to the thrower from his youth. To be able to
catch a horse in a corral round the neck, with
some certainty, can be learnt in about six months

52 THE LAZO

by a young and active man accustomed to ath-
letic exercises.

The lazo on horseback is a very different and
far more5 dangerous affair. Accidents are fre-
quent and often fatal, and the business should not
be attempted by any one who has not learnt the
art in youth. In all cattle districts, in both
North and South America, men maimed with the
lazo — having lost either fingers, or a hand, or foot
— are as common as " mainsheet men " used to be
in seaport towns in the days of " windjammers."

The lazo on horseback can be used with far
greater effect than on foot. From sixteen to
eighteen yards is a fair distance at which to catch
an animal when going at full speed. The faster
the horse is going, the more easily is the rope
thrown ; and of course the danger increases in
the same ratio. The method of casting on horse-
back is precisely similar to that used on foot. A
larger loop or noose (called armada in Spanish)
can be used, and care must be taken not to en-
tangle the coils of the " slack " with the reins, or
to catch the horse's hind legs, or head, or his fore
feet, or to touch him anywhere with the rope,
unless he is extremely tame and tractable. For
this reason a less elevation must be given to the
point of the noose, as it gyrates round the head,
on horseback than on foot ; that is to say, it
should be swung almost level round the head
before casting. The end of the lazo retained by
the thrower is buttoned into a strong iron ring

THE LAZO 53

fixed behind the rider's right thigh to a piece of
hide about three inches in length, which piece of
hide is firmly sewn into the ring of the upper part
of the strong hide surcingle which forms the girth
of the Argentine saddle.

This saddle is called el recado ; it is a modifica-
tion of the old " Bur " saddle of the time of
Charles V., and is known as albarda to the
Spaniards and bar da to the Moors. It is com-
posed of several pieces, and surmounted by a
rug or sheepskin ; the stirrups are hung long,
from the middle of the saddle, and are so small as
only to admit the toes. The Spaniards anciently
called riding in this saddle " riding a la brida "
as opposed to the short stirrups and high pommel
and cantle of the Moorish saddle, which style of
riding was called " a la gineta." The Mexican
saddle has grown out of this latter style, the
stirrups having been lengthened in order to facili-
tate mounting, and sticking to a wild horse.

When the lazo has been thrown on horseback,
and the animal caught round the neck or horns,
the difficulty and danger begin. Should the
quarry be a wild horse or mare, care has to be
taken not to let it cross either in front or behind
of the mounted horse. If it does so, there is
great danger of a half-turn being taken in the
rider's arm or leg, or even a whole turn round his
body. The least that can happen is that the
mounted horse gets entangled in the rope, becomes
frightened, and an accident is almost certain.

54 THE LAZO

Should the animal captured be a bull or cow,
the rider must manage to avoid having his horse
charged, and for this purpose immediately the
noose settles round the beast's horns, the horse-
man should turn to the near side, i.e., away from
the animal lazoed, and endeavour to keep the rope
always taut. If he succeeds in doing this, there is
little danger of the strongest bull pulling over even
a light horse ; for it is to be remembered that the
weight of the saddle and the rider is an assistance
to the horse, as making his weight more nearly
equal to that of the bull.

It must not be forgotten that in lazoing on
horseback it is the horse that works and holds the
animal caught ; the rider merely throws the lazo,
as no strength of his could hold an animal gallop-
ing at full speed. Some horses become so dex-
terous that the rider can slip off, leaving them to
keep the lazo taut, and, approaching the bull,
hamstring it, or kill it by plunging a long knife
into its neck.

A high-spirited horse that starts, stops, and
turns easily, and does not get too much excited,
is the best mount for the lazoer. A low-spirited
animal exposes its rider to danger from a charging
bull, and an excitable horse is apt to get twisted
in the coils of the lazo, or by throwing up its head,
or swerving as the lazo is delivered, to make the
aim defective. In almost every case the lazo is
thrown on the off side of the horse (known from
that circumstance in South America as the

THE LAZO 55

" lazo side "), but now and then a skilful lazoer
will throw to the near side, and catching an
animal, pass the rope over his own and his horse's
head, or over the quarters of the horse. This
process is always attended with danger, and, as
the Gauchos say, should not be attempted by
married men.

In South America the inhabitants of the
Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul hold
first place for skill with the lazo. After them come
the inhabitants of the Republic of Uruguay and
the Gauchos of the province of Buenos Ayres.

The Chilians use a slightly different lazo, with-
out a ring, and with a loop and button at both
ends. It is twisted in three strands, and known
as a " torzal." They are skilful, but, their
country being more broken, are inferior to the
men on the east side of the Andes.

The second school of lazoers is that of Mexico.
There the lazo is never made of hide, but of horse-
hair or istle, or of the fibre of the aloe. No iron
ring is ever used, and the lazo is all one piece, not
having an addition* spliced on at the end, as in
South America.

Being of lighter material, the Mexican lazo
cannot be thrown so far as that of the Pampas.
It is more easily carried, however, requires no
grease, closes more readily on the neck of the

* This addition is called La Llapa by the Gauchos, and is
also used by them for a luckpenny in a bargain. The word is
said to be of Quichua origin.

56 THE LAZO

animal lazoed, and neither cuts a horse's legs nor
a man's hands so severely as a raw-hide rope.

It is on horseback that the difference between
the two schools is most manifest. The Mexican
lazo is made fast to the saddle in front of the
rider, and hence the difficulty of throwing to the
off side is largely obviated ; as it is easy to pass
the lazo over the horse's head and keep the strain
on the rope, and hence far fewer accidents occur
in Mexico and Texas than in the Pampas. The
Mexican system is, however, less effectual against
the efforts of a heavy animal, as, the lazo being
fastened to the horn of the saddle when an animal
is caught, the rope grazes the body of the rider
during the process of the struggle, and it appears
improbable that the horse can throw as much
weight on to the rope as he can under the Argen-
tine system of fastening. It is usual in Mexico
not to tie or make fast the end of the lazo to the
saddle, but to take a half-hitch round the horn,
and hold the end in the left hand. It is con-
sidered very dangerous to tie the lazo to the bow
of the saddle, and a man who does so is said to
amarrar a muerte — that is, to tie a death-knot.
Mexicans are very dexterous with the lazo on
foot, as, owing to the lightness of their rope, it is
very easily thrown. Texans, Kansans, and men
of the North- West often use a common hemp rope
without a ring or button, but merely tie a bow-
line, and pass the coil of the rope through a bight
to form a noose. Texan cowboys are often ex-

TEE LAZO 57

tremely skilful, performing as many feats with the
lazo as the Mexicans or Gauchos, but seldom
equalling the Brazilians of Rio Grande, who are
the smartest men with lazo or bolas, or on a wild
horse, that I have seen.

The lazo, with the bolas, the boomerang, the
spear, and bow, in a few years will be but memor-
ies. Rifle and gun will have replaced or rendered
them unnecessary, and the descendants of the
wild riders who mounted " bagual " and " bron-
co," holding them by the ear, and getting to their
seats as a bird lights upon a bough, will wait to
catch the tramcar at the corner of the street.
Therefore this short description may have its
interest, being a sort of record of a dream, dreamed
upon pampas and on prairies, sleeping upon a
saddle under the southern stars, or galloping
across the plains in the hot sun, photographed in
youth upon the writer's brain, and, when recalled,
more vivid than affairs of State which happened
yesterday.

THE BOLAS

" >"pHEY have certain balls of stone " (says
Hulderico Schmidel in his " Historia y
Descubrimiento del Rio de la Plata y Paraguay ")
" tied to a long string like to our chain shot ;
they throw them at the legs of the horses (or
of the deer when they hunt), which brings them
to the ground, and with these bolas they killed
our Captain and the above referred to gentlemen."

This happened in the year 1585, when the
Flemish soldier Hulderico Schmidel fought with
the troops of Pedro de Mendoza against the
Indians called Querandis, on what is now the site
of Buenos Ayres. The captain slain was Diego
de Mendoza, brother to the general of the expedi-
tion ; the " above referred to gentleman " figure
but as " los seis Hidalgos." And thus is chronicl-
ed the first description of the " bolas," destined
since then to bring down to the ground many a
good horse and stag, and even crush the skulls
of captains and hidalgos not a few.

Confined entirely to the south of South America,
the bolas, like the boomerang, seems to have been
unknown to any tribe of savages apart from its
inventors. It grew, like other national weapons,

58

TEE BOLAS 59

from the conditions of the life and country whence
it sprang.

The Indians of South America before the
Conquest had no horses, so, living on great
plains, game must have been most difficult to
approach, and when approached consisted chiefly
of deer, guanacos, and of ostriches — all animals
certain to escape (upon a plain) if slightly wounded
by an arrow. Thus an invention like the bolas,
which if it touched the legs was certain to entangle,
was valuable, as, thrown by a strong arm, it
could be used almost as far off as an arrow, was
much more easily recovered after a miss, and ten
times easier to make. Schmidel describes the
weapon accurately when he refers to it as " three
balls of stone fastened together by a cord after the
fashion of our chain shot." Therefore, it will be
seen that the bolas known (for euphony and other
reasons) as " las boleadores " in the River Plate
stands in the same relation to the lazo as the rifle
stands to the ordinary gun.

Such as it is, no Indian, Gaucho, or any self-
respecting countryman from Sandy Point to
Paraguay, or from the Banda Oriental to Coronel,
ever stirs out without at least one pair, either
wound round his waist or placed under the " co-
jinillo "* of his saddle, ready to throw at ostriches,

* " Cojinillo," literally cushion, is the sheepskin or mat of
twisted goat's hair, which is placed over the framework of
the " recado " (South American saddle) ; over the cojinillo is
placed a piece of leather called a " sobre puesto," and the
whole is kept in place by a strong hide sircingle, known as the
" sobre-cincha. "

60 TEE SOLAS

at deer, guanacos, or at the horse of some new-
comer to the country which has escaped and scours
the plain, the stirrups dangling to the accompani-
ment of shouts of "Yd se va el caballo del
Ingles." Sometimes it serves to fight with at a
" pulperia,"* when the inevitable gin-born dis-
cussion as to the merits of the " Blancos "f and
the " Colorados " waxes hot.

Bolas for general use are made of two stones
about the size and weight of billiard balls, and
of another about half the size and egg-shaped.
All three are shrunk into bags of hide known to
the Gaucho as " retobas." Each ball is fastened
to a string of twisted hide about the thickness of a
pencil, and three feet in length. The three are
fastened in the middle like a Manxman's legs, so
that the length from the hand ball to the two large
balls does not exceed six feet, and the whole
weight is not above a pound. For horses, wooden
balls are used, and to catch ostriches, little balls
of lead not larger than a pigeon's egg, fastened to
strings of rather greater length than those I
have described.

* Pulperia is a country store where everything is sold, and
where sardines, figs, bread, raisins, and " vino seco " or
" Carlon," with square-faced gin, comprise the menu. The
bar is defended by a strong grating, and the " pulpero "
stands behind with his revolve? and a pile of empty bottles
ready for what may happen.

t " Blancos " and " Colorados " are the Ins and Outs,
and they are as hard to distinguish as are two black stones, or
as the obsolescent political protoplasms known as Whigs and
Tories.

THE BOLAS 61

The Indians in the south of Patagonia some-
times use a bola made of a single string and with
a ball attached, with which they strike and kill
wild animals, as pumas, jaguars, and guanacos.
The instrument is called " bola perdida," and, of
course, cannot be used to take an animal alive,
as it does not entangle but merely stuns the animal
it strikes. At other times they use a single string
with but a single bola and a hand ball, as being
easier to throw, lighter to carry, and much easier
to make, but it does not wind round the legs so
firmly as do the bolas of the common shape. To
throw the bolas, they are whirled round the head
and circle through the air with the two heavier
balls close beside one another, and when launched
turn round and round on their own axis in their
flight, and break in like a " twister " from the
leg side, and if the strings strike on the legs of any
animal, the motion of the bolas being stopped, the
balls wind round and round and tie the animal
as firmly as would a pair of hobbles. The
heavier kind may (on a good horse) be thrown
from fifty to seventy yards, the balls for ostriches
nearly one hundred, and the single " bola per-
dida " a hundred and twenty yards and even more,
according to the strength of the man throwing and
the speed at which the cast is made. On foot, as
with the lazo, much of the power is lost, though
as a general rule the cast is made more accurately.
When thrown the bolas are extremely hard to get
away from, and the best plan is to run towards

62 THE SOLAS

the thrower and lie down flat upon the ground.
If the man thrown at tries to run away his chance
is small, and even if armed with a revolver the
odds are much in favour of the " boleador,"
especially if he has several pairs of bolas, as, at
the distance of fifty to sixty yards, the pistol
rarely does damage if the object at which the
shooter aims is moving rapidly about ; the fact
of motion is of no consequence to the man who
throws the " balls/' their length giving such a
wide margin upon which to work. The bolas are
easier by far to learn than is the lazo, and the
danger far less great ; for as the bolas leave the
hand when thrown, the only danger lies in the
possibility of catching your own horse's legs, in
which case it is probable he will start bucking
"fit to knock down a town," and the unlucky
thrower get a violent fall and rise to find his horse
either with a leg broken or else scouring the plain
with his new saddle, and himself afoot.

An average horseman and a cricket-player
should learn the bolas in three months' practice,
though to excel (as with the lazo) the " boleador "
must have begun as a mere child, and have
" balled " and " lazoed " chicken, cats, and dogs
in order to acquire the skill of hand the natives
of the Pampas enjoy with both. Such is the
weapon (well greased with mutton fat) with which
the Gaucho and the Indian fight, catch wild
horses, deer, and ostriches, and with which their
forefathers caught the horses of the soldiers of

THE BOLAS 63

Don Pedro de Mendoza, and their grandfathers
the artillerymen of the unlucky expedition under
General Whitelock, the flags of which still hang in
Buenos Ayres in the Cathedral aisle.

In the vast territory of the Southern Pampa,
which stretches from Bahia Blanca to Sandy
Point, and from Puan to Nahuelhuapi ; in the
green prairies that reach from Buenos Ayres to
the Sierra de Vulcan, upon the park-like prairies
of Entre Rios, and the vast rolling steppes of
Rio Grande, and again amongst the apple forests
of the Andes, the bolas are the chief pleasure,
weapon, and plaything of the Gaucho of the plains.
His habits, speech, and mode of life Azara first
made known to the futile world which reads and
writes, and thinks because it reads it knows, and
to whose eyes the Pampa with its signs, its lore,
its disappearing customs, its low horizons, flat-
topped ombus, rivers and wastes, Guadal* and
Biscacheras,f its flocks of ostriches, its cattle
without number, herds of wild horses, whirling
tero-teros, and its lone ranches, is a closed book.
Nothing so pleasant in this machine-rid world as
to bestride a half-tamed horse upon the Southern
Pampas, and, well armed with several pairs of
ostrich bolas, accompanied by two good grey-

* " Guadal " is a marshy tract of ground; the word comes
from the Arabic " guahal, " mud.

t Biscachera ; the biscacha is an animal somewhat re-
sembling the prairie dog of North America. The best
description of the biscacha is perhaps that of W. H. Hudson
in his " Naturalist in La Plata."

5

64 THE SOLAS

hounds, to go upon the " boleada " — that is, to
start out ostrich hunting with several well-tried
friends, and with a " caballada " from which to
take a fresh mount when the horse ridden tires.
The Patagonian ostrich (Rhea Americana) fre-
quents the stony uplands which so fascinated
Darwin, and of which he said that all the wealth
of vegetation of the tropics had not made so deep
a mark upon his mind as the wild plains, the
solitary huts, the lonely camp-fires where the
dogs kept watch, the horses eating, tied with
their green-hide ropes, and he lay smoking,
wrapped in his poncho, looking at the stars.
Whether in Patagonia, or on the rolling plains of
brown and waving grass which stretched from
the Romero Grande to Tandil, the ostrich goes
in flocks ranging from ten or twelve up to a
hundred or even more. Scudding across the
plains before the wind, their wings spread out to
catch the breeze, it takes a well-tried horse, with
his utmost efforts, after a gallop of several miles,
to bring a man within a bola's cast. The hunters
range themselves in a formation like a fan, and
try to join the outside edges of their ranks and
get the ostriches into a circle, or else to force them
into marshy ground on which they cannot run, or
up against the margin of a stream, edge of a wood,
or border of a precipice. Sometimes the birds
scatter and break up into groups, and then the
horsemen, whirling their bolas round their heads,
bound over stones, rush through the mia-mia,

THE BOLAS 65

thread through the scrub, and, with wild cries,
incite their horses and their greyhounds to full
speed. Ponchos stream in the wind, hair flutters,
silver spurs rattle upon the raw hide girths, and
now and then a horse, stepping into a " can-
grejal,"* rolls like a rabbit, its rider seldom failing
to alight " parado " — that is, on his feet — and,
holding the long reins or halter in his hand, to
rise before his horse, and mounting, when
it regains its legs, straight to resume the
chase.

To go upon the " boleada " is the chief ambition
of every Gaucho of the south, and so that he can
make enough to keep him in cigars and gin, to
buy a new silk handkerchief or poncho now and
then, no chance that he will hire himself for any
settled work. Yet many of the " boleadores "
die at their trade, either at the hands of Indians,
by hunger or by thirst, or, failing to alight
" parado " after a heavy fall, are left on foot with
a limb broken, to die alone amidst the ocean of
brown grass, from which no man left wounded,
without a horse, escapes alive. Most of the
frontier soldiers who, in the last two generations,
themselves half Indians, have forced the Indians
back into the wild valleys of the Cordillera of the
Andes, have been " boleadores."

The couriers, who used to ride from Bahia
Blancas to Patagonia, passing the Rio Colorado,

* " Cangrejal " is a piece of ground undermined by land
crabs (cangrejos).

66 THE SOLAS

and getting across the " travesia "* as best they
might, all learned their desert lore in the pursuit
of ostriches. Perhaps Bahia Blanca was the
centre of the " bolas." Game was abundant,
cattle mostly wild, Indians swept often in their
" malones "f over the settled lands, and the wild
people known as " Badilleros " had a deep-rooted
and most logical objection to all continued work.
Even the lazo was too troublesome, and so they
lived even less comfortably than did the Indians,
raising no crops, shivering in wretched mud and
straw-thatched huts, with a horse-hide for the
door, eating no bread, and with a saddled horse
tied night and day outside the house. Their
conversation was all of horses, brands, fights with
the Indians, feats with the " bolas " ; of such a
one who, on his journey to some place, was set on
by the " infidel," and crossed the Rio Colorado
with a pair of bolas on his horse's legs ; of such
another who, carrying the mails, lost the road,
and was discovered lying dead on his exhausted
horse, his last act having been to hang the mail-
bag on a tree.

Such as they were, a hardy race — now passed,
or passing fast, into oblivion — more savage than
the Arabs, only a step advanced beyond the
Indians ; tall, lean, long-haired, hospitable, and

* Travesia = a crossing; it is generally used in the River
Plate for a tract of desert country between two fertile districts.

t " Malon " was the word used by the Gauchos for an
Indian raid.

THE BOLAS 67

thievish, abstemious as Icelanders, and yet as
very gluttons as an Apache at a dog feast ; born
almost on their horses, sitting them like centaurs,
living amongst them, talking and thinking but
of them, and shying when they shied, as they had
been one flesh. I see them, as I saw them years
ago, out on the " boleada," riding towards some
" pingo "* paradise, twisting " las tres Marias "f
round their heads, bent just a little sideways in
the saddle, as, at full speed, they plunged through
the pajonales,J flitted across the stony wastes,
sped through the oceans of brown grass, and dis-
appeared out on the Pampa as a ship slowly sinks
into the shadow of the world upon the sea.

* " Pingo " is the Gaucho word of praise and endearment
applied to a fine horse.

t " Las tres Marias," i.e., the " Three Marys," a euphuism
for the " Bolas." It is also used for the three bright stars in
Orion.

£ Pajonales, i.e., canebrakes or thickets of Pampa grass.

S.S. "ATLAS'

IT was a filthy autumn day in New York, with
Fifth Avenue looking more than usually
vulgar under the leaden sky, and the streets
carpeted with rotting plane-leaves, as I drove,
jolting over the rough cobblestone, to a wharf
near Dubrosses Ferry to go on board the Atlas.
The s.s. Atlas was a type of ship well known in the
Seventies, but now obsolete. In those days the
" tramp " had scarcely made its appearance, and
the liner was less frequent and less gorgeous than
at present.

Vessels long, iron-built, flat-sided, and coffin-
like, of the Atlas type held an intermediate posi-
tion. They looked for cargo where it might be
reasonably expected, and took passengers to
whom a long passage, rough food and poor
accommodation were rendered indifferent through
lack of means. The American agent had informed
me that the fare from New York to Glasgow was
£10, and that the vessel was a Scotch boat, in
which I should find Bible and whiskey, and might
expect to be in Glasgow in twelve days, if (so

68

8.8. "ATLAS" 69

the agent said) the Lord was willing and the
Scotchmen did not overdrink themselves. I had
no deck-chair, the decks were an inch deep in coal-
dust, and the vessel went to sea at once. Leaving
Sandy Hook we encountered the full force of a
north-easterly gale, and I (the only passenger)
retired at once to my athwartship bunk, to be
miserable and endeavour to read the " Faerie
Queene," my only book, and the only book on
board except a Bible and a bound-up volume of the
" Reaper " and some professional works. For
weeks, as it appeared to me, it was " Burley
Banes," rattle of ropes, racing of screw, banging of
my portmanteau as it washed to and fro in a foot
of water in the cabin, groaning of timbers, roaring
of the wind, bellowing of the Blatant Beast (in the
" Faerie Queene "), shouting of the boatswain,
pattering of naked feet upon the deck ; then a
fitful dozing, broken but by the rare visits of the
steward with a " cup of arrowroot and whiskey,
sir," to tell me everything was battened down,
and that the skipper had been sixteen hours on
the bridge and looked like Lot's wife when she
enjoyed her last wistful glance at Sodom. Air
stifling, lamp smoking, drops of moisture on every
plank, a continuous dropping of water on to my
pillow, rats running across the floor, a dense,
steamy feeling which made one sleepy, crumbs of
biscuit in the bed-clothes, a futile tin basin float-
ing in the cabin, a brandy-bottle propped between
a Bible and a sponge in the fixed washing-stand,

;o 8.8. "ATLAS"

guttering candles swung in gimbles, decks which
seemed to rise and hit one in the face when stagger-
ing out in the rare intervals of the storm, to see
yards of bulwarks swept away, feeling one's way
between the seas, clutching a life-line to the
engine-room to listen to the yarns of the chief
engineer, a Greenock Ananias of the first water,
and bushy bearded as befitted one who had " gone
out in '47, second engineer aboard the craft what
took out Rajah Brook." Then back to bed, wet
through, and back into a trance between sleep
and waking, more brandy, arrowroot, more
" Faerie Queene/' more stifling, and the vessel
labouring so heavily that when the copper cargo
shipped at Copiapo shifted on the fifth day out, it
seemed she lay almost upon her broadside in the
sea. And still I liked the voyage, and even took a
pride in knowing we had sighted Rockall, hoped
in my heart of hearts we should sight Iceland, and
yet was miserably seasick all day long, and all
night long lay half awake, meditating on the
adventures of Sir Satyrane, of Britomart, Par-
lante, and the Faire Florimell, and all the other
characters of Spenser's masterpiece, who in some
curious way seemed to become connected with
the ship.

After the seventh day no cooking, galley fire
put out and steward staggering in drunk, with a
Bible in his hand, white-faced and frightened,
" rubber " sea-boots on, and plate of cold salt
horse and biscuit, and, of course, more whiskey ;

8.8. "ATLAS" 71

fitfully came the strains of " Renzo " as the crew
set the fore topmast staysail, and in my berth I
learned how " Reuben Renzo " shipped aboard a
whaler, " Renzo, boys, Renzo, " heard his ad-
ventures, cruel treatment by the mate, and was
most interested to find that for a change his
virtue had its reward at last, and at the present
time " he was the skipper of a sugar droger."
Weeks seemed to pass, and on a day the Captain,
clad in dripping oilskins, looking in for a moment
with a speaking-trumpet in his hand, deigned to
impart the information that we had a slant of
wind, and though the smoke-stack had fetched
loose, he reckoned to make Cape Clear, " damn his
eyes, forgive him, God, for swearing," in a few
hours.

Now floated down to me the cheering melody
of " New Orleans," with its inspiriting chorus of,
" Yah yer, ho, roll and go," and somewhat in-
consequent but Demosthenic envoy of " Hell to
yer soul, is it tay that ye want ? " as the crew
" set sail to steady her," as my familiar the
steward, having discarded whiskey, fear, and Bible,
for the nonce, and bearing hot sea-pie came in to
say.

At last on deck, with Rathlin Island on the
starboard beam, steaming towards the Mull ;
a great sea change, no boats, bulwarks all washed
away upon the weather side, doors torn off the
hinges, the " fetched loose " smoke-stack, coated
white with salt, and stayed up in a clumsy

72 8.8. "ATLAS"

fashion with some chains ; rigging a mass of
tatters, halyards flying loose, the jack-staff gone,
the Captain haggard and red-eyed, the officers
all cheerfully profane, the crew going about like
men after a long debauch, but cheerily, as hauling
in the main sheet they bent their backs, taking the
time from a Long Island fisherman who did not
pull the value of a cent, and hauled together,
keeping time to the innumerable verses of that
old-world lyric of the seas, " Tom's gone to Hello."
The Mull and Pladda, Lamlash Island, Cloch
Lighthouse, and the winding river with its fair-
way marks, Dumbarton Castle, and Dumbuck,
Elderslie House, and at the last the Broomie-
law ; black decks again, and then I step ashore
in " Glesca " to find it " Sawboth," and be asked
by the pious whiskey-seller, where I essayed to
change a sovereign to pay my cab, if I was sure I
was a " bona feede traveller."

Ten days flew past at home with theatres, dress-
clothes, good dinners, and the unaccustomed feel
of comfort, so strange to those who but a week
ago have been the inmates of a tramp. Ten days
amongst the faces, once so familiar, but which
to-day may look quite strange if we should meet in
limbo, purgatory, or wheresoever it is the souls of
travellers pass their appointed time. Ten days
and back again upon the Broomielaw, rain, fog,
and coal-dust, and the lights of whiskey shops
glaring like orgres' eyes upon the crowd, decks
filthy, crew either half drunk or else disabled

8.8. "ATLAS" 73

by disease ; the skipper sulky, mates thinking
about home and surly, the boatswain almost
inaudible through a bad cold, and the poor
draggled drabs upon the shore looking like ani-
mated rag-shops in the December gloom. Scuffl-
ing and cursing, creaking of blocks, throbbing of
the screw, and then the vessel slides out into the
foul-smelling, muddy drain they call the Clyde,
slips past the shipyards, passes Blythswood,
leaves the Cloch astern, runs past the Cumbraes,
where the minister once used to pray for the
adjoining islands, England and Ireland ; leaves
Pladda on the weather side, begins to dip and roll
and sends me to my bunk to lie half stupid,
torpid, a prey to nausea and foul smells, till the
throbbing ceases, the heaving and the pitching
stop, and going upon deck I see the sun and find
that we are anchored in the Garonne under a
vineyard, and about a mile outside Paumac.
Here we intended to take in emigrants for the
River Plate, the vessel, during her ten days' rest
in Glasgow, having been whitewashed down below
and fitted up with tiers of bunks after the fashion
of those vans in which sheep make their railway
journeys, and just as comfortable. Visions of
tugs coming sweeping down the yellow stream,
crammed thick with people, all with Basque caps
and carrying bags, bundles, and the inevitable
bird-cage, without which no emigrant embarks.
Glimpses of garboard strakes, as the tide sets the
steam launches round, and the emigrants rush to

74 8.8. "ATLAS"

one side chattering in Basque ; clattering of
donkey-engines worked by a grimy " greaser,"
and recollections of an interminable song about
" Oh mariniers, bons mariniers, a ccmbien
vendez-vous votre ble ? " sung by black-haired
and red-sashed men, working the cargo under the
direction of a much-bejewelled stevedore. Then
all the emigrants crowd down below, kissing takes
place, men hug their sweethearts, to wed whom
they are going foreign, and hope in ten years'
time when they return with dollars to find con-
stant, unimpaired in virtue and in face, with the
same figure which the dim but treasured photo-
graph sets forth. A bell rings and the quarter-
masters clear the ship, the friends who go ashore
holding their handkerchiefs, dirty with tears, to
their red eyes ; the friends on board waving their
greasy hats, and neither trying in the least to keep
their feelings in, but weeping lustily after the
primitive and natural fashion which relieves a
man and makes him feel that tears wash out his
grief, rendering him happier than those whom
education, custom, prejudice, or what you will,
have forced to face their misery with dry eyes.

So past the Tour de Cordouan, and, after,
Lisbon, where again the ship took in another
freight of human cattle, this time chiefly peasants
from the Galician hills, who emigrate en masse,
leaving their villages deserted and the houses
closed, for wolves to scamper through the deserted
streets on winter nights. Then out into the

8.8. "ATLAS" 75

" roaring forties," followed by a rising gale.
Hell down below amongst the emigrants, and no
one on board who could speak French or Spanish,
still less Portuguese, except the wretched reader
of the " Faerie Queene." So through those alley-
ways I weltered sick to death, when difficulties
rose, and jabbered with the unlucky peasants,
who bore their sufferings manfully, sitting on the
deck all jammed together like sardines, from the
grandmother to the new-born infant, and almost
every family hampered with a great wicker bird-
cage, though they were going to a land of parrots,
macaws, toucans, humming-birds, cardinals and
flying spots of jewelled rainbow, compared to
which the birds of Europe all seem made of sack-
cloth or of mackintosh ; but were not Abana and
Pharpar superior to all the waters of Judea ?
But it seems natural to man upon a journey to
impede himself with all the living things he can,
and to trail draggled birds, bound in their
wicker servitude, beyond the seas. As he could
not free man, body or soul, by all the strength of
prayer and of example, St. Francis perhaps did
well to open bird-cages and set their inmates free
whenever he got the chance ; at his beatification,
had I been there I should have urged against the
arguments of the Devil's Advocate, this fact,
and pled that every rookery about the place, all
larks, quails, pigeons, thrushes, blackbirds, linnets,
and starlings should have had a chance to register
their vote. And then the gale subsided, and the

76 S.S. "ATLAS"

old semi-tramp lurched at nine knots before the
following seas, till in a day or two we struck the
north-east trades, carried them fair and light, and
woke one morning in the dream world of sapphire
sea, clear sky, and flying fish darting before the
ship, Portuguese men-of-war on every side of us ;
warm air, a feeling of content, a heavy roll, sails
flapping against the rigging, now and then filling
with a jerk as if they would tear out of the bolt
ropes, in fact, the magic of a fine day in a low
latitude not to be represented to the mind by a
curved line and straggling lettering, Tropic of
Capricorn, as in a map. Like a white cloud we
sighted Teneriffe, fully thirty leagues away,
passed close to Santa Cruz, left Lanzarote on our
lee, coaled at St. Vincent, passed under San
Antonio rising a piece of Africa lost in the sea,
and then headed across the ocean towards Brazil.
Christmas Day caught us somewhere : no doubt
the longitude and latitude is still recorded in some
forgotten log-book with the due " observations "
and " remarks " : but we were Scotchmen and
recked but little of such Erastian festivals,
although the emigrants performed a sort of
mutilated mass upon the deck, a Biscayan
schoolmaster mumbling his mystery from a
prayer-book and the faithful gathered in a crowd
a little aft of the fore bitts, whilst the West of
Scotland crew pushed through them now and then
to trim the sails or make their way into the fore-
castle. At times a perspiring fireman emerged

8.8. "ATLAS" 77

out of the stokehole, a " sweat rag " round his
neck and lump of waste in his black hands, to
breathe and see the show, sat looking for a minute
as if the worshippers had been a tribe of savages,
and then climbed down his ladder backwards,
just pausing for a moment as his head sunk
below the coaming of the hatch to mutter some-
thing of an uncomplimentary nature on the Whore
of Babylon.

Days followed starry nights and we began to
know each other, and the officers and men having
emerged out of their oilskins, and the watch and
watch duty which made them north of 40°, so
to speak, fenced off from the mere landsmen and
oppressed with work, they now began to take a
patronising interest in the passengers and to chat
freely with the emigrants, their deep-sea dignity
laid on one side, perhaps because they could un-
bend more safely as no other sailors were about.
The captain, who since then has risen to command
big ships, to be commodore (I think) of a great
line of steamers, and to retire upon his well-
earned pension and laurels to Blackheath, to bore
himself consumedly on shore, and to regret the
days, no doubt, when he commanded the s.s.
Atlas, was a pious, blaspheming Scotchman, built
as it seemed to last for ever, hardy and wise, beard
like a scrubbing-brush, quick-tempered and good-
hearted, a perfect seaman of what I may term the
transition school, having served all his early life
in " wind-jammers," but " sceenteefic " in his

78 S.8. "ATLAS"

way, and able, above all, to deal with a scratch,
rough, skulking crew such as we had on board.
The mates indefinite, all Glasgow men, well
educated, reading " improving " books ; one of
them with a master's certificate, and all so boorish
in demeanour that till you knew them it appeared
that they were mad. Much is forgiven to North
Britons, for they have drunk much, but why
they should think that rudeness shows indepen-
dence is not so clear, for above all men in the
world they are the first to see a slight intended to
themselves. The boatswain and quartermasters
were all Englishmen, two of them old men-of-
war's men, careful and tidy as old housemaids,
and often in their watch off, on a fine night, I
saw them washing their clothes amid the jeers of
the Scotch crew, " who did not hold with it,"
and thought that water had only one use, to mix
with whiskey, and that that use was only made of
it by fools, by weaklings, and by Englishmen.
At night I sat and yarned with them, tried
unsuccessfully to learn to splice, thinking the
art might turn out useful in mending lazos,
listened to their jokes and forgot most of them,
but still remember something about the " Mary
Dunn, of Dover, a brig (I think) wot went to sea
with three great bloomin' decks and 'ad no bot-
tom/' The crew appeared to be composed
mainly of costermongers with a stray seaman here
and there, 'longshoremen, and an occasional
West Highland fisherman. The doctor (brother

8.8. "ATLAS" 79

of a well-known portrait painter), who perchance
may smile when he reads this, informed me that
their habit was to come on board blind drunk,
without a kit except a new jack-knife and new
sea-boots, to pitch the latter down the fore peak
and fall themselves upon the top of them, lie
prostrate for a day or two, and then get up and
ask him for " blackwash," of which he kept a
mighty store, knowing the medicines by experi-
ence which were most likely to be useful in their
case. The fishermen were quieter and had sea-
chests, good stocks of clothes, and were sailors
in a fashion, all having made a trip or two at sea.
When sails were hoisted they always got close to
the block, " lifted the shanty/* yo, heave, ho !
and made as if they were about to pull like oxen,
but stopped there, and if some three or four of
them had clapped on to the same rope the sail
would never have been set in the whole watch
they pulled so " cartiously."

The Spanish and French emigrants were mostly
Basque, all wearing " boinas " and " alpar-
gatas," speaking dialects of the Basque tongue
quite comprehensible to one another, and yet
hating each other to the full as much as Irish and
English, merely because an arbitrary line ran
through the mountains where they all were born.
A long thin Bordelais called Pierre, but known as
" Monsieur Pedro," because he spoke a little
Spanish, ruled them like slaves, and when they
fought knocked them about till they were quiet,

6

8o 8.8. "ATLAS"

at times coming aft to ask for medicines from the
doctor with a grave face, often explaining with
some detail that a woman was apparently ill with
fever, but that he (Monsieur Pedro) thought
that was untrue, and " the dam woman really
make too much love." But this love or fever to
the doctor were all one (perhaps they are to every
one) and Pierre used to go off contented with a
seidlitz powder and two pills. At night the
emigrants danced to the strains of an accordion,
sang " me gastan todas " to the guitar, or joined
in chorus to the eighty verses of an old southern
French song, known as " La Blonde," a damsel
who was beloved by all " Les Chasseurs," but who
incontinently flung herself away upon " a bracon-
nier," perhaps because as the chorus used to set
forth " Les braconniers sont dangereux et nom-
breux," — but why spy into the motives of a
poacher and his wife ?

The great Scotch festival found us off Fernando
Noronha, the little island off the coast where the
Brazilians had a penal settlement. The day
broke hot, and as we passed the island it loomed
low, the palm-trees standing in a sort of mirage
so that they seemed to have no roots and float
above the land like parasols, between the sand
and sky.

How the crew got the liquor no one ever knew,
but before twelve o'clock the ship was like a
pandemonium or the east end of Glasgow on a
fast-day night. From the stoke-hole came the

8.8. "ATLA8" Si

sounds of " Auld Lang Syne," the watch on deck
were stupid, and the emigrants scattered before
them like chickens before the gambols of a large
Newfoundland pup. Just when the skipper came
on deck, his sextant in his hand, ready to shoot
the sun, a man walked up to him and said, " Hoo
are ye, Captin ? Ye ken although my feyther
aye sat under Dr. Candlish I'm a deevil wi' the
lasses, and so are ye yirsel." The captain who,
since early morn had been boiling with fury,
growled like a bear, told the man roughly to go
forward and lie down, received an insolent reply,
then knocked him down, and had him put in
irons, then carried to a spare cabin and locked in,
where he continued to howl " Auld Lang Syne "
until he fell asleep. But by this time the decks
were filthy, men falling down and sick all over
them, the mates and engineers working like slaves,
punching and kicking, driving the drunken crew
below, until at last they were all got into the fore-
castle, and a man planted at the door armed with
a hand-spike to keep them in.

The day passed rather awkwardly, for though
a special dinner had been prepared, a list of toasts
drawn out, haggis and cock-a-leekie duly prepared,
no one could eat it, for, till night fell, the mates,
the passengers, doctor, purser, and such of the
emigrants as were able were forced to work the
ship ; the doctor and myself steering occasionally
and putting the helm invariably hard up, when
it should have been put hard down, keeping the

82 8.8. "ATLAS"

vessel yawing about as if we wished to write
our names upon the sea. Next morning decks
were washed, black eyes and broken heads attend-
ed to, the prisoner let out on promise of amend-
ment, and a search made to find how the men had
got the drink. Nothing, of course, came out, and
we pursued our voyage, touching at Rio, and half-
way to the Plate ran into a Pampero, which kept
us out a day, till one fine morning we sighted
Lobos, slipped past Maldonado, left the English
bank upon our lee, passed close to Flores Island,
and anchored finally just underneath the
" Mount." The Neapolitan who rowed me to
the shore said that the Atlas looked to him like
a coffin, but having spent so long aboard of her I
cursed him for a fool, told him the blood of St.
Januarius would never liquefy if he went on like
that, and turning saw the skipper leaning on the
rail waving his hat and calling out " So long ;
don't forget New Year's Day." I said I would
not, and the Atlas passed out of my life, and what
became of her only the underwriters could
possibly have told. Perhaps she was broken up
for scrap iron, lost on a well-known shoal, sold
for a tramp, and maybe dodges about between
the Islands of the Chinese Seas, if she has not long
ago foundered in the night after the fashion of so
many of her class.

But anyhow my copy of the " Faerie Queene
still smells of cockroaches, is spotted on the
cover with salt water, some of the leaves are

8.8. "ATLAS" 83

foxed, the title-page is lost, and when I open it
even the music of " Epithalamion " is dumb, and
in its stead I hear the swishing of the sea, feel
the screw racing and the long-drawn-out notes
of a " forebitter " seem to quiver in the air,
until I shut the book.

BRISTOL FASHION

FROM Mogador to Mossamedes runs a line
of coast which from the time of Hanno to
the present day has been the wonder and the
despair of men. There barbarism has had its
last entrenchments ; even to-day some of them
still remain unstormed.

Cannibalism, missionaries, " feitigo," " gri-
gri," the gorilla, gold dust and ivory, the negro
race, great swamps, primeval forests, stretches
of barren sand, leagues of red earth as at King
Tom, bar harbours, " factories," beads, amulets,
slave trade, Liberia ; the curious names of places,
as Bojador, Bisagros, Portendik, with Jella Coffee,
Fernando Po and Annobon, St. Paul's, Loanda,
Half-Jack, and Ambrizette, form a strange hell-
broth of geography, ethnology, fauna and flora,
superstition and religion up to date, remnant of
the pre-wages era, republic of the type of Gerol-
stein, an animistic fugue of barbarous music, in
which " Marimba," war-whistle, and tom-tom
all bear their part.

First, Mogador, called Sueira (the picture)
by the Moors, almost an island, dazzlingly white,

84

BRISTOL FASHION 85

confined to Africa but by a rope of sand, kissed
by the North-east Trade, and looking ever out on
Lanzarote, towards which it seems to sail. Then
Agadir, once Santa Cruz, and held by Spain, and
now deserted but by some families of Jews and a
few wandering Arabs, and then the country of the
Troglodytes, whose caves remain, but from whose
hills the warlike dwarfs described by Hanno have
long disappeared : next the Wad Nun, the Draa
where Arabs, mounted on their " wind-drinkers/'
chase ostriches and speak the dialect of the
Koreish ; then Cape Juby, and from thence to
Bojador, the Cape known as the world's end till
Gilianez, with Zarco and Tristan Vaz, passed to
the Bay of Garnets, and claimed the land for
Spain.

Ediisi, Ibn Batuta, with Leo Africanus and
Ibn-el-Wardi, and before them Herodotus,
Polybius, Procopius, and historians Roman,
Arab, and Greek, have left accounts of some sort
or another, down to the Senegal ; but that they
knew the land south of Cape Palmas is not made
out. They tell us of vast deserts, burning sands
between Cape Barbas and the Senegal ; all this
we know, and little more to-day, for, from the
sea, the eye surveys the sand unbroken but by a
palm-tree here and there, an Arab Duar, and now
and then a rider on a camel, or a troop of ostriches.

Now by degrees the country changes, and great
woods appear joining the mangrove swamps
which fringe the coast and run from Bathurst,

86 BRISTOL FASHION

Sierra Leone, past the Grand Sesters, Piccaninny
Sess, Cape Palmas, Accra, Acasa, through the
Gold Coast, where a white vapour hangs over
everything and obscures the sun as it were covered
with fine gauze. Passing Fernando Po, which
rises from the sea, an offshoot from the mountains
of the Cameroons, past Annobon, the Congo, St.
Paul's, Loanda, and Benguela, the dense bush
continues till by degrees the vegetation grows
more sparse, and below Mossamedes, after having
passed more than two thousand miles from
Mogador, again the land gets sandy, arid, and sub-
tropical.

During the Sixties, along the coast laden with
rum and gin, with gas-pipes muskets long as a
spear and painted red, brass dishes, musical-
boxes, trade powder, cheap German clocks and
French indecent prints (as presents for the chiefs),
beads, bells, and looking-glasses, well " sized "
cottons, and all the other glories of our time and
state with which we push the gospel truths,
extend our trade, and bring the " balance "
of the world under the shadow of our glorious
flag, ran barques, all owned in Bristol, usually
about five hundred tons, all painted chequer-
sided, sailing short-handed out of Bristol, and at
Cape Palmas shipping a gang of Krooboys for the
cruise.

Between Cape Mesurado and Cape Palmas the
Krooboys have their towns, the Little Kru,
the Settra Kru, King Will's Town, and the rest.

BRISTOL FASHION 87

A race apart, the Lascar of the coast, the Kroo-
boy for the last two hundred years has been in
intercourse with men from Europe, and still
remains a worshipper of gods which, in the
latitudes of Aberdeen, of Sunderland, the Hartle-
pools, and other regions where the true faith
reigns, are not accepted. A healthy pagan, tall,
active, with muscles like a Hercules, head like a
comic masque, speaking a sort of " petit negre,"
or " Blackman English/' a jargon, call it what you
like, the groundwork of it oaths ; his face tattooed
on either temple with a triangle, from which a
line of blue, which starts below his hair, runs down
his nose, giving him when he laughs a look of
having two distinct faces. The Krooboy ships
for a cruise, and then, on his return to the five
towns, reverts to paganism ; a merry mis-
believer, over whose life no shadow of the Galilean
tragedy has passed, and who, therefore, ships
aboard an English ship in the firm expectation of
returning home after a two years' cruise to invest
his wages in the purchase of more wives, two
hundred years of missionary labour having as yet
proved ineffectual to eradicate the natural poly-
gamistic tendencies which Providence (who one
supposes acted after due consideration) seems to
have planted in the fibre of all mankind, except,
of course, ourselves. Strong, tall, a coward,
animistic to the core, and called indifferently
" Jack Beef," " Sam Coffee," or " Small Fish,"
the Krooboy is a man apart, and for the test of

88 BRISTOL FASHION

moral worth our Christian navigators put a bale
weighing two hundredweight upon his head, and
if he carries it safe through the surf, he is engaged.

Of all the barques none was considered smarter
than the Wilber force owned by the Messrs.
Fletcher, commanded by one Captain Bilson
(Honest Tom Bilson), a man who knew the coast
by day and night, each harbour, inlet, mangrove
swamp, and knot of palms, as the Lone Palm,
Three Palms, the " Carpenter," and the rest from
Sherboro Island to Kabenda Point.

" Honest Tom Bilson " all the traders called
him with a laugh, and by the various chiefs he
was best known as " Blistol Fassen " from his
constant using of the phrase. " Ship-shape and
Bristol Fashion " was his word, and after pouring
out a stream of blasphemy at some unlucky
Krooboy stowing a sail, he used to raise his eyes
to heaven and exclaim, " Oh, Lord, Thou knows
my 'eart, but these 'ere Krooboys make me peril
my immortal soul ten times a day ! " for Bilson
was a member of a congregation in the rare inter-
vals he passed at home, and even when at sea, on
Sundays, read his chapter to his crew, not greatly
understanding what he read, but reading, as he
heaved the lead, took in top-gallant sails at night,
or purged his crew on entering low latitudes,
from sheer routine. Of course he had a wife at
home legally married, or, as he said, " wedlocked "
to him in a chapel ; but matrimony, I take it,
does not bind much below the " roaring forties,"

BRISTOL FASHION 89

so in his cruises up and down the coast, when he
had shipped his Krooboys, having no gift of
tongues, he also shipped a negro girl to act as an
interpreter and keep things " ship-shape " in his
cabin, sew on his buttons, play on the " marimba,"
and act as intermediary in his dealings with the
chiefs. This was the " fassen " of the coast, and
in Accra a sort of seminary existed to train,
instruct in English, and turn out young negro
girls for " the profession," which was held an
honourable and lucrative estate. These damsels,
known as " consorts," used to affect great state
and dignity, wearing their clothes so stiffly
starched with arrowroot that, had you cut their
legs off, still their skirts would have maintained
their balance by sheer force of starch.

Aboard these trading barques the life was easy,
running down the coast from town to town, for
then the skippers seeking a cargo did the work
which now is done by hulks, and got their cargo
here and there, picking up palm-oil, camwood,
ivory, gum copal, kola nuts, beeswax, gold dust,
and ostrich feathers on the barter system, in
direct dealing with the headmen of the towns.
To-day upon the coast the days of " seeking " are
long ended, for hulks in every river collect the
country produce, and the captains of the " tramps "
who take it off see little more of native life than
what is seen by sailors all the world over, that is
the " tingel-tangel," gin-shop, and haunt of low
debauchery, but in those halcyon days a captain

90 BRISTOL FASHION

of a barque shared with the missionary and the
head trader of the " factory " the chief position
of the unofficial white man from Cape Palmas to
the Bights.

p Pleasant it was to drop into some river where
no trader lived, signal for a pilot to the chief, and
either in his hut or in the cabin of the ship " set
up a trade," after a long palaver where cases of
gin from Rotterdam formed the chief arguments.
Although the barques carried no guns, still they
had arms aboard — muskets and cutlasses, which
the skipper used to keep in his own cabin under
key. At times the captain used to land, and with
a guard of men and squad of Krooboys carrying
merchandise (that is, of course, gin, rum, and
powder, with trade guns), proceed to interview
some chief in his own house. Then palm-wine
flowed, tom-toms were beat, the negro women
danced after a fashion which even at the Moulin
Rouge would not be tolerated, presents were
exchanged, and a great banquet was provided
and discussed in the chief's own room, generally
furnished with three or four iron beds, a cuckoo
clock, two or three musical-boxes, and on the walls
either religious pictures setting forth the Prodigal's
Return, Rebecca at the Well, the Ark, or else
French prints, all of the most superlative degree
of " pornographickness." At least such was the
furniture in Jella Coffee, regnante King Jo Tay,
who with his consort Margo used to provide the
skippers of the passing ships with yams and sweet

BRISTOL FASHION gi

potatoes, palm-wine and bananas, and send oft
canoes crammed to the gunwale with that special
feature of his land, the " Jella Coffee runner."
On shore at " factory " and port the straggling
European population struggled with fever, fought
with gin, lolled half the day in hammocks, im-
ported horses from the Gambia, only to see them
die within the year, talked of the old country,
occasionally got up a prize-fight borrowing the
missionary's steam launch when necessary to run
the fighters into native territory. Flies and
mosquitoes made life miserable, men took the
fever overnight, were dead by morning, buried at
gunfire, and none seemed happy but the " snuff
and butter " coloured children, who swarmed in
evidence of the philoprogenitiveness of the
members of what Mr. Kipling calls " the breed."
No nonsense about Bilson, " shipshape and
Bristol fash," and " treat a bloody nigger well if
he works well ; and if he kicks, why then speak
English to him," was the burden of his speech.
Philanthropists, with missionaries and those who
talked of equal rights for all mankind, he held as
fools, calling them " bloomin' sentimentalists,"
which term he thought the most contemptuous
a man could bear, and fit for landsmen, swabs, and
those who sailed out of the northern ports in
brigs and schooners, and all those mariners who
had not attained to the full glory of a Bristol
barque.

" I like a naked nigger " (he would say)

92 BRISTOL FASHION

" dressed in his breech clout," but the self -same
" nig " rigged in a cheap slop suit he thought un-
natural, and asked with many oaths, and tags of
Scripture referring to the Amalekite dwellers in
Canaan and the Cities of the Plain, if you would
like to give your daughter to a negro man. This
not infrequently produced unpleasantness, for
no missionary, philanthropist, or any other man,
no matter what he thought, had ever answered
with a downright " Yes."

Then Bilson used to triumph and call for drinks,
sweetening his gin with orange marmalade, and
calling to his " Accra girl," tell her to dance, just
in the way that Vashti should have danced had
she not shown the proper spirit that has caused
her to be handed down as an example to all self-
respecting wives, in the immoral legend where the
loves of Esther and Ahasuerus are set forth.
After much rum, his " consort " bit by bit took
off her stiff-starched clothes and stood half-
naked ready to dance after the manner known as
" Bonny Fash," a " Fash " which has its merits
even compared to the gyrations of the half-naked,
perspiring spinster at a London Ball. And whilst
the negress danced to the accompaniment of a
tom-tom and a flute, bending about her body like
a snake, imparting that strange rotatory motion
to the pelvis which so charms the Eastern and
repels the moral Western man (accustomed as he
is to London streets at night), waving her arms
about in phallic gestures, turning her eyes back

BRISTOL FASHION 93

till the pupils become almost invisible, brushing
against the knees of the spectators as a cat arches
his back against a table-leg, Bilson would talk
with tears in his eyes of home, about his wife, his
children, and his wish they should attend good
schools, his daughter learn the piano, French,
dancing, and the mysterious things which make a
girl a lady " all the way up " (as Bilson used to
say), and that his son through the gradations of a
mortarboard, college degree, and, what was
necessary, become at last what his proud father
styled a " blarsted gentleman."

Men's minds are built in reason-tight com-
partments, and what they do but little influences
them, for the real life we live is one of thought,
and it is not impossible even that in a brothel
the mind may still be pure.

Honest Tom Bilson cared not for speculations,
but acted in the manner he called practical, that
is, he tried to square his conscience with his life,
except when personal interest, hate, love, or any
other human passion intervened. After the
fashion of most common natures, he hated to be
over-reached, and if a " nigger " was the over-
reacher his fury knew no bounds. Seated in the
caboose over his " okross " stew, which, as he
said, reminded him of a fat eel well-stewed in
glycerine, sipping his gin and talking to his mate
(the Accra girl listening as solid as a joss), the
chart spread on the table marked with rings
where cups of cocoa had been set upon the paper,

94 BRISTOL FASHION

the picture of his wife dressed in her best silk
gown with brooch large as a cheeseplate pinned
on what he styled her " boosum," glancing down
at him from the wall, his Bible and revolver
handy, his naked feet in carpet slippers, shirt-
sleeves rolled up, the scuttles open, and the ship
anchored outside the bar of a small river, his
boatswain came below and told him in a report
garnished with oaths that several of the Krooboys
had stolen a boat, and having crossed the bar, had
paddled up the river and disappeared. Now
Bilson knew that to recover boat and " niggers "
was beyond his power, for in the little native town
no white man lived, and native chiefs never give
up a man who seeks protection, but plunder
him themselves, and make excuses saying,
" Nigger, he no lib', gone into bush all the same
turkey, we no catchey he." To quote the boat-
swain, " You could have shovelled out the
blasphemy with a tin sugar-scoop, and the whole
* droger ' seemed alight from stem to starn."
To lose a boat upon the coast meant money,
much inconvenience and the impossibility to get
another till he arrived at Cape Coast Castle,
Accra, Sierra Leone, or some considerable port.
This did not move him near so much as the be-
wildering thought that he, the smartest skipper
on the coast, had been outdone by his own Kroo-
boys, " niggers," savages, heathens, and yet sharp
enough to leave him in the lurch. The " palaver "
which he held lasted till early morning ; almost a

BRISTOL FASHION 95

case of " Palm-tree Brand " was finished, and
when the sun at last broke through the heavy
mist which in the tropics heralds day, and when
the tree-frogs chirping like cymbals woke the
echoes of the heavy-flowing tidal stream, mate,
negress, and the boatswain lay asleep upon the
cabin floor, and only Bilson sat erect, his head
quite clear, his resolution fixed, and taking down
his Bible, assured himself that eye for eye and
tooth for tooth was God's own law, then went on
deck.

Having got " Scripture 'for it," Bilson would
stick at nothing, and he knew that Kroomen
stranded ashore far from Cape Palmas had but
one course of action if they wished ever to see
their native land again ; that was, to sell the
stolen boat and ship aboard the first returning
vessel they could find : and this returning vessel
Bilson resolved with many oaths should be his
own.

The dog watch saw him almost hull down, and
when in five days' time about six bells, the vessel
entered the river from the eastward, she had
suffered a great change. The chequer sides were
gone and a red stripe replacing them caused her to
look much higher, the cherished figurehead setting
forth Wilberforce in the act of benediction, the
joy of Bilson's heart, was out of sight, cased up in
canvas and painted black, so as to scarcely show
apart from the body of the ship, and a few heavy
weights moved further aft gave her a different

7

96 BRISTOL FASHION

set. The square yards on the mainmast all had
disappeared, and she presented (to a Krooboy's
eye) the appearance of a Yankee barquantine
sailing from Portland, Maine, and to make all
things right the Stars and Stripes flew from her
peak, and, as she anchored Bilson came on deck,
dressed in white drill, a broad Bahama hat, his hair
dyed black, moustache cut off, and beard and
whiskers trimmed to the goatee shape which, in
those days, bespoke the Yankee, in the same way
as the full-shaped beard was held to be the trade-
mark of the " limejuice " Englishman.

As Bilson had expected, a canoe put off, and,
as it neared the ship, one of the missing Kroo-
boys, known as Tom Coffee, hailed and asked,
" 'Spose Massa Captain want Krooboy, Tom
Coffee, Little Fish, Joe Brass lib' for ship one
time." And Bilson answering in an exaggerated
New England accent that he was short-handed
and was going north, the unsuspecting Krooboys
ran their canoe under the vessel's counter and
came on board. As each man stepped on deck
a heavy blow stretched him half-senseless, and he
recovered to find himself in irons and listen to
Bilson pouring out his rage in all the choicest
phrases of the dialect of Sierra Leone, " You
damn niggers, you tief ship boat, eh, you think
you better man past Captain Bilson, eh, I tell you
wash 'um belly, no see Cape Palmas dis one time,"
and calling to his boatswain he had the three poor
wretches thrown into the hold upon the cargo,

BRISTOL FASHION 97

the dunnage of it being logs of camwood, every
hole of which harboured a scorpion, a centipede, or
mangrove crab, which, if you crushed it, sent
forth a scent worse than a Chinese stinkpot, a
tanyard, slaughter-house, or fashionable lady
smothered in the newest perfume made from the
dross of tar.

His " niggers " well secured, Bilson weighed
anchor, and, sailing down the coast, ran into
a small river that he knew, from whence
Brazilian slavers shipped their " rolls of tobacco,"
and, backing his foreyard, lay to, going himself
well armed in his own whale-boat to call upon the
chief. Late in the evening he returned, and with
him came a war-canoe manned by some sixteen
savages all with their teeth filed to a point, with
collars of leopard's claws, armlets of ivory, and
armed with spears.

The wretched Krooboys, gagged and tied hand
and foot, were dumped like logs into the war-
canoe, and Bilson, after hauling in his boat,
braced round his yards, and slipped into the night.

Years afterwards, when seated in his villa out-
side Bristol, after attending chapel, the Sunday
dinner done, grog on the table, churchwardens
alight, and feet in slippers, the sermon well dis-
cussed, the chances of the next election of the
town council all talked over, his " wedlocked "
wife and daughter having retired, Bilson was wont
to tell how that in all his life he had been done but
once and that time by some " bloody niggers ; "

98 BRISTOL FASHION

but he would say, " They stole my boat, they did ;
their names was Little Fish, Tom Coffee, and Joe
Brass, stole my boat, eh, but by Gawd's help I
ketched 'em and sold 'em to a chief of one of them
cannibal set-outs of niggers down Congo way ;
fixed 'em, I did, you bet, in Bristol fashion."

TANGER LA BLANCA

GIBRALTAR melts away, taking the out
line of a sleeping lion, the peaks above
Gaucin stand out as clearly as if cut out of card-
board, and on the other coast, Ape's Hill in
Barbary rises up like a gigantic sugar-loaf.

Pillars of Hercules, Gibel Tank, and Gibel
Musa, Gate of the Road, the " Puerta del Camino "
of the mediaeval Spanish chroniclers, they still
remain guarding the entrance to the great salt
lake around whose shores all that was interesting
in art and science of the ancient world, arose and
fell.

From Gibel Musa, Tank embarked on his
adventure, one of the three or four in which
whole peoples have engaged, and, landing on the
other outpost of the then known world, overran
Europe, and had his progress not been stayed
but by an accident we might to-day have heard
the call to prayers arise in Aberdeen. From Gibel
Tarik, after eight centuries of peace and one of
bitter persecution, the Morisco remnant of the
once conquering Yemeni hordes embarked, leav-

99

ioo TANGER LA BLANOA

ing the land which cast them out, priestbound and
slothful and the poorer by their loss.

Next, Algeciras, the green island (El Jezirah
el Hadara), from which it takes its name, lying
athwart its harbour like an enormous whale.
Coasting along La Tierra de Maria Santisima,
with Africa on the port bow, one wonders which
of the chosen lands, that of the Blessed Virgin
or that of Sidna Mohammed, looks most in-
hospitable. On both sides mountains, all clothed
with arbutus, dwarf rhododendron and the
kermes oak, run to the water's edge. On either
side the isolated farms are low, flat-topped, and
white. The population both in Spain and Africa
is pastoral, and flocks of goats and hairy sheep
are tended, in Spain by a brown, wool-clad figure
with a sling, and on the other coast by a white-
robed statue armed with a sword-shaped club,
bare-footed and bare-headed, and standing list-
lessly to watch the steamer pass, unmoved except
perhaps to curse the strange " maguina " made by
the Frank. From both the goatherds floats a
song as wild and quavering as a heron's scream,
taught to them both by their remote and common
ancestor from Hadramut. Almost awash, the
ramparts of Tarifa rise, then, bit by bit, the
crenelated wall, the Castle of Guzman el Blanco,
identical, unchanged from that May morning
when the Moorish Caid exposed the Christian
captain's son upon the ramparts, promising his
life, if but the father would consent to raise the

TANaER LA BLANCA 101

seige, and upon his refusal hurling the headless
body of the boy into his camp. Tarifa, the most
African of all the towns of Spain, let Ronda,
Cuenca, Granada, Niebla, Huelamo, and the
white city, on the hill in Aragon called Arcos de
Medina Celi, all contest her claim. Houses
intact as when their Moorish owners left them ;
the gate of the town a horseshoe arch with due
inscription, setting forth God's name in the linked
characters of Cufa, which he loves. Outside the
" noria " revolves, turned by a woman and an
ass, palm-trees and canes, with Azofaifa, Ajonjoli,
and Albahacagrow — all introduced, as Abu Zacaria
tells us in his " Book of Husbandry " from farthest
Nabothea. Lastly Las Tarifefias, dressed in
their curious straight mediaeval petticoat, their
black lace veil covering their faces all except one
eye ; which custom, had Mahommed ever fore-
seen, theirs would have been the greater punish-
ment— that is, of course, when the Believers held
the town ; but what if Christians fall into the
Tarifefias' snare and, as the people say, drown in
their eye, he takes no heed. Tarifa sinks into the
sea, and the sandy plain through which the
Guadalete runs, and where Don Roderick lost the
land, God having given the victory to the Moors
(the embraces of La Caba having detained him too
long in the north), appears but for a moment and
then sinks like Spanish glory with a long struggle,
into the blue haze. Through the white tide-rip,
which in old times must have been as a Syrtis to

102 TANaER LA BLANCA

the banked galleys as they floundered through ;
under Cape Malabat, on which a Moorish Atalaya
stands, guarding the coast with three old Spanish
guns of brass prone on the ramparts, for the
carriages have long ago been used as firewood,
or have mouldered into dust. Under its semi-
circle of low hills, the houses on the Marshan
standing well out against the sky, Tangier appears,
the Alcazaba dominating the old white town.
Palm-trees spring from the courtyards, no smoke
curls up to spoil the atmosphere, and the mosque
tower in the centre of the place reverberates the
sun from its green tiles, the light flashing and
turning iridescent on them as on the scales of some
gigantic lizard's back. Row after row of flat,
white houses, like an interminable terrace, con-
stitute the town, all so distinctly seen in the clear
air, that from the steamer's deck you fancy you
could step from house to house, and from the last
descend into the realms of the Arabian Nights.
But thirteen miles from Europe, as the gull flies,
millions of miles away in feeling and in life.
Tanger la Blanca, Tangier the white. White-
wash and blinding sunlight on the walls ; upon
the beach, white sand ; the people dressed in
robes of dusky white, a shroud of white enfolds,
a mist as of an older world hangs over it, coming
between our mental vision and the due compre-
hension of the secret of the place. The town is
old enough, God knows, older than London.
Goth, Spaniard, Portuguese, Greek, Roman,

TANGER LA BLANCA 103

Arab, and Carthagenian have fought for, con-
quered and possessed it (or it them), have left it,
some have disappeared, their very countries
knowing them no more, but still the city stands,
enduring sun, dust, rain, wind, the lapse of time,
neglect, and still but little changed from when
Count Julian held it for the empire of the Greeks.
Since Tarik sailed out of its port to conquer Spain
is but a day in its existence. Ibn Batuta left it
and wandered up and down the world for thirty
years, visiting Persia, Irak, and Malabar, and
penetrating to that strange land where, as he tells
us in his " Travels," he found even amongst the
dwarfish, yellow Dj in-descended men, some
friends of God. Then, tired of travelling, he
returned to write and muse, and found the place,
as he himself relates, unchanged ; then died, and
we may hope that Allah gave him rest at last,
after his wanderings. But thirteen miles from
Europe and yet less spoiled with European ways
than is Crim-Tartary. Nothing has changed for
centuries. In the narrow streets the porters
stagger under burdens, swaying and shouting
" Balak ! " as they go ; the water-seller, with his
great skin bag, brass cup and bell, winds in and
out amongst the crowd ; women, all swathed in
haiks, pass silently along, to meet their lovers, to
the bath, to gossip with their friends, or sit in
rows to tell their troubles to the reader in the
mosque.

Othman, Ali, or Sidna Mohammed himself,

104 TANGER LA BLANCA

appointed Friday to be the womens' day, and so
it has continued, for time, rightly considered, but
sanctifies that which itself is good and goes some
way to make mankind endure even the most in-
tolerable of ancient customs and of modern laws.
As in the time of Jacob, women draw water from
the well, the camels rest beside their burdens in
the market-place, the grave-faced men sit selling
trifles squatted in their little shops, whilst round
the public writers covering their yellow slips of
paper stand knots of people wondering at their
skill, for writing of itself has something sacred
which attaches to it, for all believers know the
Cufic alphabet was sent direct from God. The
rich man perched, all swaddled up in fleecy clothes,
upon his pacing mule, his house secured and wives
locked up, the key which guards their virtue stuck
in his waistband, rides down a cobbled street,
under an archway, along the beach, and then
entering an aloe-planted lane comes to his garden,
then dismounts and meditates or sleeps, perhaps
reads the Koran, the verses of el Faredi, or per-
haps does nothing, and returns home content.
The poor man lounges all day about the streets,
prays at the stated times, dozes and prays again,
then sleeps face downwards in the courtyard of the
mosque and is contented with all Allah sends, if
bread be not too dear. The beggars sitting at the
gate, flies settling on their sores, blind, maimed
and scrofulous, ragged and filthy, yet are all con-
tent, for hath not Allah made all kinds of men —

TANGER LA BLANCA 105

rich, poor and outcast, Caids, Governors and
Sheikhs, sailors and camel-drivers — and all to
praise his name ? It may be that the entirely
materialistic view of life conduces to content.

Again the mind of man perhaps can grasp the
idea of a single God with greater ease than it can
grapple with the Trinity. Still it is so : the sun,
the sound of running waters and the hum of flies,
the clear white light, the unchanging life — all
seem to satisfy, and after all is not a palm-tree,
with its leaves hanging quite listlessly against
the trunk, perhaps more restful to the eye than is
an oak, shattered and twisted, its branches sway-
ing and tossing in the never-ceasing storm ?
Content and ignorance, delight in life, tears, joy
and laughter unrepressed, the simple faith,
few wants and no ambition — all conjoin to make
the place as unlike Europe as it is possible to be.
The Arabs tax us with our miserable looks, say
we are all in terror of ourselves, afraid to be alone,
and that we need no hell to punish us for lack of
faith after the life we lead. It may be so, and
that a group of horsemen flying on the beach,
their horses' manes and tails streaming like sea-
weed in the wind, their clothes all fluttering out,
firing their long, curved guns and calling on God's
name, is just as pleasing as a group of grey-
clad men, even though educated, who pass their
lives in turning out sized cottons by the piece
or an infinity of water-closet handles.

If in Tangier a man is owner of a horse, a wife

io6 TANGER LA BLANCA

or two, a camel or an ass, what does it matter if
from the coast to Fez it takes a month to ride ?
When he gets there at last, he sells his bale of
calico, packet of leather, or his box of spice, and
after selling sleeps as peacefully as if a train had
whirled him there in sixteen hours, packed like a
sardine in a third-class carriage and obliged to
plan to cheat his fellows against time. What
matter if, to go a little lower in the social scale,
a man has but a donkey and one wife, a little plot
of land, or water-melon patch, and goes to market
pushing, so to speak, his ass in front of him with all
his merchandise perched on its back, singing the
while in a falsetto key, if he is free from care ?
So thinking of such things, my mind sometimes
goes back to the white Arab town sleeping as peace-
fully as it has slept for ages, and looking out on
Europe with an air of wonder tempered with
contempt. And I am glad that the chief industry
is intermittent, leaving full time for meditation
and for faith ; for all you have to do, is heap your
orange-peel, dead cats, and any offal you can find,
in an esparto basket and sling it on an ass, then
drive him gently to the beach, unload, and after a
due interval has passed, replace your basket,
shout " Arranemook ! " and then begin again.

A SURVIVAL

TO be a Scotchman nowadays is to fill a
position of some difficulty and trust.

It is expected that when he takes pen in hand
that he must write, no matter what his predilec-
tions, antecedents, or education may have been,
a language which no Englishman can understand.
It is in vain to plead that all our greatest writers
in the past have written in what they hoped was
English.

Hume, Smollett, Thomson, and Sir Walter
Scott, with Dugal Stuart and Adam Smith,
endeavour to make themselves intelligible, even
to Englishmen.

Dunbar, the greatest poet that Scotland has
produced, wrote in a language but little differing
from that of Chaucer, who, by the way, he styled
his master, acknowledging him to be of " Makkaris
Flowir."

Bishop Douglas did not translate Virgil into
the rough jargon of the peasants of his day.

Master Robert Henry son, the author of
" Robin and Makyne," one of the few pastorals
107

io8 A SURVIVAL

tolerable to those who do not live in towns, is
almost as easy of comprehension as is Spenser.

Drummond, of Hawthornden, rarely uses a
Scottish word. Carry le, it is true, made himself
a language after his own image in which to express
his philosophy, but neither language nor philos-
ophy seem likely to endure, and future generations
may yet remember him but as a humorist.

Burns occasionally " attempted the English,"
but his success in that language was not striking,
and a man of genius is neither subject to rules,
nor can he usually found a school to carry on his
work.

Be all that as it may, the fact remains that the
modern Scottish writer to be popular in England
must write a dialect which his reader cannot
understand. If novelists north of the Tweed
must live (and write), they must perforce adopt
the ruling fashion, if possible be clergymen and
treat entirely of weavers, idiots, elders of churches,
and of all those without whose aid, as Jesus, son
of Sirach says, no state can stand.

Now, though I have but little skill of the jargon
which these Levites have invented, let no Southron
think that I depreciate the worthy folk of whom
they write. They are all honourable men (I
mean the Levites), and if it pleases them to
represent that half the population of their native
land is imbecile, the fault is theirs. But for the
idiots, the precentors, elders of churches, the
" select men," and those landward folk who have

A SURVIVAL log

been dragged of late into publicity, I compas-
sionate them, knowing their language has been so
distorted, and they themselves been rendered such
abject snivellers, that not a henwife, shepherd,
ploughman, or any one who thinks in " guid braid
Scots/' would recognise himself dressed in the
motley which it has been the pride of kailyard
writers to bestow. Neither would I have English-
men believe that the entire Scotch nation is com-
posed of ministers, elders, and maudlin whiskified
physicians, nor even of precentors who, as we
know, are men employed in Scotland to put the
congregation out by starting hymns on the wrong
note, or in a key impossible for any but themselves
to compass.

England to-day looks at a native of North
Britain from a different standpoint from that of
half a century ago. In the blithe times of clans
and mosstroopers, when Jardines rode and John-
stones raised, when Grahams stole, McGregors
plundered, and Campbells prayed themselves
into fat sinecures, we were your enemies. In
stricken fields you southern folks used to discomfit
us by reason of your archers and your riders
sheathed in steel. We on the borders had the
vantage of you, as you had cattle for us to steal,
houses to burn, money and valuables for us to
carry off. We having none, you were not in a
state to push retaliation in an effective way.

Later, we sent an impecunious king to govern
you, and with him went a train of ragged courtiers

no A SURVIVAL

all with authentic pedigrees but light of purse.
From this time date the Sawneys and the Sandies,
the calumnies about our cuticle, and those which
stated that we were so tender-hearted that we
scrupled to deprive of life the smallest insect which
we had about our clothes. You found our cheek-
bones out, saw our red hair, and noted that we
blew our noses without a pocket-handkerchief,
to save undue expense. You marked the exigu-
ity of our " Fund Scots," our love of sixpences
(which we called saxpence), and you learned the
word " bawbee." So far so good, but still you
pushed discovery to whiskey, haggis, sneeshin,
predestination, and all the other mysteries both
of our cookery and faith. The bagpipes burst
upon you (with a skirl), and even Shakespeare
set down things about them which I refrain from
quoting, only because I do not wish to frighten
gentlewomen. Then came the road to England
that we chiefly used, all others in our country
being but fit for partridges, but that well worn and
beaten down, just like the path to hell. King
George came in, in pudding- time, and all was
changed, and a new race of Scotsmen dawned on
the English view. The '15 and the '45 sent out
the Highlander, rough-footed and with deer-
skin thongs tied round their heads, dressed in
short petticoats and claymores in their hands,
they marched and conquered and made England
reel, retreated, lost Culloden, and the mist re-
ceived them back. But their brief passage altered

i

A SURVIVAL in

your view again, and you perceived that Scotland
was not all bailie, prayer-monger, merchant, and
sanctimonious cheat. By slow degrees we rose
from mosstrooper and thief to impecunious
courtier, then became known as pious business
men, ready to cheat and pray on all occasions,
but still ridiculous, as those who have no money
must of necessity appear to richer men. Our
want of wit amazed you, for you did not know we
wondered at your want of humour, and so both
of us were pleased.

Then Scott arose and threw a glamour over
Scotland which was nearly all his own. True
we were poor, but then our poverty was so roman-
tic, and we appeared fighting for home and haggis,
for foolish native kings, for hills, for heather, free-
dom, and for all those things which Englishmen
enjoy to read about, but which in actual life
they take good care only themselves shall share.
The pale-faced Master and the Highland chief,
the ruined gentleman, the smuggler, swashbuckler,
soldier, faithful servant, and the rest, he marked
and made his own, but then he looked about to
find his counterfoils, the low comedians, without
whose presence every tragedy must halt.

Then came the Kailyarders, and said that Scott
was Tory, Jacobite, unpatriotic, un-presbyterian,
and that they alone could draw the Scottish type.
England believed them, and their large sale and
cheap editions clinched it, and to-day a Scotch-
man stands confessed a sentimental fool, a canting

8

ii2 A SURVIVAL

cheat, a grave, sententious man, dressed in a
" stan o' black," oppressed with the tremendous
difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and
above all weighed down with the responsibility
of being Scotch. I know he prays to Gladstone
and to Jehovah turn about, finds his amusement
in comparing preachers, can read and write and
cypher, buys newspapers, tells stories about
ministers, drinks whiskey, fornicates gravely,
but without conviction, and generally disports
himself after a fashion which would land a more
imaginative and less practically constituted man
within the precincts of a lunatic asylum before a
week was out.

All this I know, and I know virtue which has
long left London and the South still lingers about
Ecclefechan, hangs about Kirriemuir, is found at
Bridge of Weir, and may yet save us when England
is consumed with brimstone, as were the Cities of
the Plain. But I object to the assumption that
the douce, pawky, three per-centling of the kail-
yard has quite eclipsed the per-Culloden type.
In remote places it still remains in spite of educa-
tion, kodak, bicycle, cheap knowledge and ex-
cursion trains ; it lingers furtively without a
reason, but perhaps that of disproving Darwinism.
The men who named the hills, the streams, the
stones, who hunted, fished, and fought, who came
out of the mist, who followed like dumb, faithful
dogs, the foolish Stuarts, and fought against the
brutal Hanoverians to their own undoing, have

A SURVIVAL 113

now and then a type lingering pathetically and
ghost-like from the dim regions of a pre-com-
mercial age.

All that still lingers from another age is what we
call a ghost — a ghost perhaps of happier, freer
times, when men were less tormented about little
things than we who live to-day. Even in Scot-
land there still exist some few remains of the pre-
Knoxian and pre-bawbee days, though fallen into
decay.

Not far from where I live there dwells a worthy
man, Scotissimus Scotorum, a Scot of Scots, en-
riched by sweating of some sort, but still a kindly
soul. Kindly, of course, in everything but trade,
which is a thing apart and sacred, semi-divine,
sent straight from God, and like divinity, the
teinds, baptismal regeneration, and hell-fire, quite
beyond argument. A Liberal, of course — that is,
a Liberal wishing to drag down all men over him —
a Tory of the Tories to all below him, but yet a
kindly, worthy wealthy, and not intolerable man.
A moralist, if such a thing there be, thinking all
sins but fornication venial. A teetotaler — that is
for others — but himself taking at times his glass
of whiskey for the reasons which have been so
cogently set forth by St. Paul the Apostle to
the Caledonians. My friend lives in a house to
which is joined a small estate called Inverquharity.
Now, though a Radical, nothing rejoices him so
much as to be designated territorially as Inver-
quharity, and to give out he is third cousin to the

ii4 A SURVIVAL

Earl of Bishopbriggs. These inconsistencies give
zest to life and go some way towards redeeming
even North Britain from the load of dreariness
which Kailyarders depict. One of the themes the
worthy ex-sweater, now turned bonnet-laird,
delights to dwell on is, that race has little influence
upon a man. For take (he says) a Highlander
and place him in the same conditions as a Low-
land Scot, and he at once alters his mode of life,
becomes industrious, and soon assimilates himself
to those with whom he dwells. Nothing so diffi-
cult as to discuss such questions with my worthy
friend. What the true Scotsman wants is argu-
ment, and it angers him as much if you agree with
him as if you argue and confute his argument. If
you agree you are a hypocrite, and arguing shows
your narrow-mindedness, so that the safest is to
say nothing and be thought a fool. Talking one
day he broached the theory that the crofters of
the Hebrides were really fond of work, and that
their idleness arose from lack of opportunity.
" See," he remarked, " in Manitoba how they
improve in new surroundings, and without a
landlord to rack-rent and oppress/' All land-
lords, in my friend's opinion, are rank tyrants,
and though he likes to meet them individually,
even to dine with them if they have titles, in the
bulk they are accurst. Of course there is no
tyranny in trade, and if a strike takes place, why
who so loud as he to call for extra police, to write
for soldiers, and to complain that magistrates are

A SURVIVAL 115

weak, and that a whiff of melenite is needed just
to clear the air ? — for commerce, as all know,
came down from heaven, took root in Glasgow,
and never can do wrong.

Talking of earls and dukes, and of the shame-
less immorality of countesses, the iniquity of
game laws (though he himself preserves), stakes
in the country and the state of trade, the villainy
of servants, the rate of illegitimate births and
other things on which men placed as he is placed
delight to dwell, he asked me if I knew a farm
known as the Offerance. I knew the spot, a little
croft with hideous little house, four windows and
a door, with slated roof, and with two spruces
ragged with the wind which sweeps across our
favoured land on either side the " toun." A little
garden, in which grew " berries," as we style
gooseberries and currants, and those sub-acid
apples and plums which flourish in the north. A
barn, a byre, and a horse mill, with its mush-
room-looking top and four wide openings, con-
trived on purpose to give the horses cold when
resting from their work ; and over all that air of
desolation which the lack of flowers and neatness
with the excess of wind and rain impart to Scottish
farms. Withal not ill-appointed, the fields well-
drained and top-dressed, the fences in repair, the
gates well painted, and the whole place a thrifty,
ugly, wire-fenced, and necessary blot upon the
land. Though a small holding nothing was done
by hand, crops were scientifically dropped from

ii6 A SURVIVAL

machines into the ground, and then the harvest
ready, as artfully manoeuvred out, so that the
acme of rural dulness and town desolation was
attained.

The tenant of this paradise was just about
to leave, and Inverquharity announced that he
was going to put his theory of environment into
immediate execution, to get a crofter family
down from the Hebrides to occupy the place. It
seemed to me that if he must have Islanders, he
might as well have got them from Tahiti as the
Hebrides, but still I held my peace.

Time passed, and Inverquharity and I drifted
apart, and Offerance, crofters, and theories of
rent escaped my mind. Riding one day to visit
a hill farm, I passed the Offerance. It looked
a little unfamiliar, and seemed to have passed
into a different state. Outside the door a fire
of peats was burning, on which a kettle, hung to
three birchen poles, essayed to boil. Before the
fire two ragged children sat, searching each other's
heads as diligently as they had both been scrip-
tures. A different air of desolation brooded on
the place. The fences were all broken, ground
untilled, and little zig-zag paths traversed the
fields where short cuts had been made. The
gates were off their hinges, lay on the ground or
had been burnt, and in a gap a broken cart stood
jammed into the hedge. The stock was not
extensive, and reminded one of that one sees out-
side an Arab's tent, or Indian wigwam, mangy

A SURVIVAL 117

and full of ticks, and with the bones protruding
through the hidebound skin. Two skinny ponies,
with their feet hoppled with withy ropes, which
left the flesh all raw, were feeding on the weeds.
Some Highland cattle and a goat or two, some
scabby sheep, a pack of sheep dogs, and a lean,
miserable cow, comprised the lot, and left me
wondering if the owner ever expected to pay rent,
or looked upon the Offerance as a fee simple
given to him by Providence on which to put out
all his agricultural lore, and teach the natives the
Ossianic mode of carrying on a croft. Close to
the house a tall, athletic man, half drunk (but not
so drunk as to have lost his wits), wrapped in a
plaid and leaning on a stick, his fell of rough black
hair descending to his small grey eyes, stood
looking at a woman and a girl planting potatoes
after the method known in the Highlands as the
" lazy bed." That is, instead of ploughing, you
dig lightly with a spade, turning the turf a little
over on one side, then put in the potatoes and re-
arrange the turf. The plan is excellent, and saves
much work, manure is not required, or sweat of
brow, and the soil is exhausted almost as quickly
as a crofter can desire.

To see and understand took me but little
time, and mentally I said, " This is the crofter
family which my worthy friend has brought."
On my horse fidgeting the man looked up, came
to the road unsteadily, and tried to seize my reins,
then, taking off his hat, poured out a flood of

n8 A SURVIVAL

compliments, all in the Gaelic tongue. I on my
part caught a word here and there, learned he
was glad to see me, and understood nothing par-
ticular, except the word " Tighearnas," which he
repeated at the end of every phrase. It means a
chief, and is used by Highlanders as gipsies use
" captain " on a racecourse when they wish to
flatter or delude. The rain poured down, and he
stood there bareheaded, talking and talking till I
thought I should go mad. In a mixed jargon of
broken Gaelic, and that sort of idiot English that
we use to make our meaning clear to foreigners,
I asked him to put on his hat and not to be a fool.
He answered, " Neffa," and though I found that
he knew English pretty well, he beckoned to his
wife to act as his interpreter.

" Donald," she said, " is out of Wester Ross,
he does not like the digging, but Inverquharity
is pleased with him, for he puts up such a bonny
prayer." This with the sing-song accent which
all Highlanders affect.

Knowing the species, I was sure digging and
ploughing, and every form of man-ennobling
work, was not his style, and asked why he stood
bareheaded, and if he liked the place.

" Och, aye," he said, " Offerance of Inver-
quharity is a pretty place, and a vera pretty name
it has itself whatever."

Strange as it may appear, the uncouth syllables
sounded quite different when pronounced by him.
His wife, continuing, informed me that Donald

A SURVIVAL 119

never put on his hat when talking to one he
thought a " chentleman," and though he cared
but little for hard work, he was a " pretty game-
keeper," and a first-rate man to beat.

The semi-sacrament of whiskey-money having
duly passed, I rode away amongst a shower of
what I took for blessings in the Ossianic tongue.

Turning I saw the Offerance through the rain,
black but uncomely, ragged and wind-swept —
a picture of the old-world Scotland, which has
almost disappeared. Sloth was not altogether
lovely, but prating progress worse.

I might have left the place quite discontented
even with mankind had I not recollected that the
world is to the young, and noted that the chil-
dren's diligence had been rewarded, and that one
was handing something to the other with quite an
air of pride.

HEATHER JOCK

TO differ from the crowd, whether as a genius,
an idiot, a politician, or simply to have
a differently shaped beard from other men, will
shortly be a crime. At present, out of pure
philanthropy for ourselves, we seclude our mad-
men in prisons euphemistically called lunatic
asylums. In the East the madman still walks
the streets, as free as any other man, and gives
his judgment on things he does not understand,
like any other citizen. True, in the East there
generally is sun, and every evil with the sun is
less.

There is no sun in Scotland, but not so long
ago our semi-madmen and our idiots philoso-
phised about the world, taking the bitter and the
sweet of life in public, just like the rest of us.
The custom had its inconveniences ; but, on the
other hand, perhaps, was just as merciful as that
which to-day shuts up all harmless, foolish crea-
tures within four walls to save the sane the pain
of seeing them.

120

HEATHER JOCK 121

What reasons influenced William Brodie, bred
a weaver at the Bridge of Weir, in Renfrewshire,
to first turn pedlar, or, as we say (Scotice),
" travelling merchant," and from that to trans-
migrate himself into a wandering singer and
buffoon under the name of Heather Jock, are quite
unknown. The status of a Scotch Autolycus has,
no doubt, charms. We do not look on pedlars
with the disdain with which in England the trad-
ing class is viewed. Rather, we honour them for
the use we have of them, knowing the Lord created
them for some wise purpose of his own not yet
made plain. Hucksters and merchants both are
prone to sin, and as a nail sticks fast between the
joinings of the stones, so sin sticks close between
selling and buying : at least so Jesus son of Sirach
tells us, and though not quite canonical himself,
his works are much esteemed in Scotland for their
" pawkiness." But, being practical, we see as
little honour in higgling for thousands as for half-
pennies, and call men " merchants " whether
they carry packs upon their backs or send out
ships freighted with shoddy goods to sell to
niggers.

So no one asked his reasons, but accepted him
just as he was, with headdress like an Inca of Peru
stuck all about with pheasants' and peacock's
feathers, bits of looking-glass, adorned with
heather, and fastened underneath his jaws with a
black ribbon ; with moleskin waistcoat ; bee in
his bonnet ; humour in his brain ; with short

122 HEATHER JOCK

plaid trousers, duffel coat, and in his*liand"a~rude
Caduceus made of a hazel stick, and in the'centre
a flat tin heart, set round with jingling bells, and
terminating in a tuft of ling. In figure not unlike
a stunted oak of the kind depicted in the arms of
Glasgow, or such as those which grow in Cadzow
Forest, and under which the white wild cattle
feed, as they had done since Malcolm Fleeming
slew one with his spear and saved the king.

The minstrel's features of the Western Scottish
type, hard as a flint, yet kindly, his eyes like dullish
marbles made of glass, such as the children in
Bridge of Weir call " bools," his hair like wire,
his mouth worn open and his nose merely a trap
for snuff. Hands out of all proportion large, and
feet like planks, his knees inclining to be what the
Scotch call " schauchlin," and imparting to his
walk that skipping action which age sometimes
bestows on those who in their youth have passed a
sedentary life. A true faux bossu, and though
without a hump, having acquired the carriage
of a hunchback by diligence, or sloth. In fact,
he seemed a sort of cross between a low-class
Indian, such as one sees about a town in South
Dakota, and an orang-outang which had some-
how got itself baptised.

From Kilmalcolm to Mauchline, from Dairy
to Ayr, at a Kilwinning Papingo, at races, meets,
fairs, trysts, at country house or moorland farm,
to each and all he wandered and was welcome.

His minstrelsy, if I remember right, was not

HEATHER JOCK 123

extensive as to repertory, being comprised of but
one dreary song about a certain " Annie Laurie,"
originally of a sentimental cast, but which he
sang with humorsome effects of face, at break-
neck speed, jangling his bells and jumping about
from side to side just like a Texan cowboy in
Sherman, Dallas, or some Pan Handle town
during the process of a bar-room fight, to
dodge the bullets. At the end he signified his
wish to lay him down to die for the object of his
song, and did so, elevating, after the fashion of
expiring folk, his feet into the air and wagging to
and fro his boots adorned with what the Scotch
call " tackets."

Perhaps it was the dispiriting nature of the
performance which drew sympathy from men
whose lives were uninspired. They might have
thought a livelier buffoon untrue to nature from
his unlikeness to themselves. What he had seen
during his wandering life he treasured up, relating
it (on invitation), to his hearers in the same way
an Arab or a Spaniard quotes a proverb as if it
was a personal experience of his own. Once in
his youth "west by Dairy" he chanced to see a
panorama of the chief incidents of Scottish history.
What specially attracted his attention (so he
said) was when the lecturer enlarged upon the
fate of Rizzio : " Man, he just depicted it so
graphically ye fancied ye could hear the head
gae dunt, dunt, dunting, as they pulled the body
doon the stairs."

124 HEATHER JOCK

Our northern wit runs ghastly and dwells on
funerals ; on men at drinking parties, dead but
quite the gentleman still sitting at the board ;
sometimes on people drunk in churchyards ; but
always alternating, according to the fancy of the
humorist, from one to the other of our staple
subjects for jesting, whiskey, or death. But
Heather Jock, like other memories of youth faded
away, and the constant spectacle of much superior
buffoonery in parliaments, in marts, at scientific
lectures, literary clubs, and other walks of life,
bore in upon me that all the world is but a panto-
mime, badly put on the stage by an incompetent
stage manager, ourselves the mummers, and each
man, according to the estimation he is held in by
his fellows, a pantaloon or clown.

One day in Tucuman, amongst the orange
gardens, mounting my horse, which for my per-
sonal safety I had to do with a bandage over his
eyes and foot tied to the girth, and thinking that
the business of my life, which then consisted
chiefly in going out by break of day to round my
cattle up (parar rodeo, as the Gauchos say),
was not inferior after all to that passed in a
European office — where men begin at twenty to
enter nothings in a ledger, and old age creeps on
them finding them bald-headed at the same task —
I chanced to get some letters.

The messenger who brought them slowly
got off his horse ; his iron spurs, like fetters on his
naked feet, clanked on the bricks of the verandah ;

HEATHER JOCK 125

he seemed perturbed — that is, as much perturbed
as it is possible to be upon the frontiers — his hat
was gone, around his head he wore a handkerchief
which had been white when it left Manchester
some years ago ; his horse was blown and wound-
ed, but still he stood impassively handing me the
bag and asking after the condition of my health
with some minuteness. Was he tired ? " No,
Sen or, not over-tired." Would he take a drink ?
" Yes, to the health of all good Christians."
Where was his brother who used to ride with
him ? " Dead, patroncito, and I hope in Glory,
for he died like a Christian, killed at the crossing
of the Guaviyu by the infidel who came on us as
we were crossing, with the water to our saddle
skirts." This with a smile to make the unpleasant
news more palatable in the delivery. Christian,
I may explain, upon those frontiers is rather a
racial than a religious status. All white men are
ex officio Christians, with the possible exception
of the English, who, as they listen to their mass
mumbled in English, not in Latin, are less
authentic. However, said the Gaucho (always
with my permission), he would saddle a fresh
horse and with some friends go out to fetch the
body.

Whilst he caught a horse — a lengthy operation
when the horses have to be driven first to a corral
and then caught with the lazo — I took the bag,
with the feeling, firstly, that it had cost a man his
life, and then with the instinctive dread which,

126 HEATHER JOCK

when in distant lands always attends home news,
that some one would be dead or married, or that
at least the trusted family solicitor had made off
with the money entrusted to him to invest. \

Nothing of this was in the letters, only, as per
usual in such cases, accounts of deaths and
marriages of folk I did not know ; of fortunes
come to those I most disliked, and other matter
of the regulation kind with which people at home
are apt to stuff their letters to their distant
friends.

One of the letters had a scrap of newspaper in-
side it, with the announcement of the death of
Heather Jock. " At Bridge of Weir upon the
I3th instant, William Brodie, at the age of eighty-
two, known through the West of Scotland to all,
as Heather Jock."

jSo Heather Jock would strive no more with
life, with people just as foolish if more wicked
than himself, struggle no more against the diffi-
culties of English concert pitch, and be with
" Annie Laurie " and the other puny dead who
erstwhile plied his trade. Then I remembered
where I saw him last : at an old house in Scotland
perched on a rock above the Clyde and set about
with trees, the avenue winding about through
woods and crossing a little stream on bridges
made the most of by landscape-gardeners' art.
I saw the yew-trees under which John Knox is
said to have preached and dealt with heresy and
superstition, like the man he was, driving out all

HEATHER JOCK 127

that kindly Paganism which is mingled with the
Catholic faith, and planting in its stead the stern,
hard, hyper-Caledonian faith which bows the knee
before its God in a temple like a barn, and looks
upon the miserable east end of Glasgow as a
thing ordained by God. The tulip-tree, the
yellow chestnut, and the laurels tall as houses all
came back to me, the little garden with its curious
stone vases and the tall hollyhocks. I saw the
river with the steamers passing between the fair-
way marks, saw Dumbarton Castle on its rock and
wondered how it could have been the seat of
Arthur's Court, as wise men tell. Again I recol-
lected that one day upon the sands I found the
outside covering of a cocoanut and launched it
on the Clyde just opposite to where the roofless
house of Ardoch stood, and watched it vanish
into nothing, after the fashion of an Irish peasant
woman on the quay at Cork watching the vessel
take her son away, and just as sure as she of the
return.

Then it occurred to me that Heather Jock had
been a different character from what he really was,
and that there had been something noble and
adventurous in his career. That he had, some-
how, fought against convention, and preferred,
after the fashion of Sir Thopas, to " liggen in his
hood/' and go about the world a living protest
against the folly of mankind. But, God pardon
me, for that way exegesis lies, with finding out of
hidden, mysterious esoteric motives for common

9

128 HEATHER JOCK

actions, after the fashion which would astonish
many, who, if they came to life again, would find
those worshipping who, in life, were their most
bitter foes.

Nothing of moment was in the other letters,
and when the neighbours mustered, armed with
spears and rusty guns, lazo and bolas, but each
man mounted on a first-rate horse and leading
another to run away upon in case of danger, I
mounted a " picazo,"* which I kept for such
occasions, knowing he was a horse " fit for God's
saddle," and taking my rifle with me unloaded,
not from superior daring, but because I had no
cartridges.

Just at the crossing of the Guaviyu, close to a
clump of " Espinillo de Olor," we found the body,
cut and hacked about so as to be almost unrecog-
nisable, but holding in the hand a tuft of long
black hair, coarse as a horse's tail, showing the
dead man had behaved himself up to the last, like
a true Christian.

At the fandango after the funeral, during the
hot night, and whilst the fireflies flickered amongst
the feathery tacuaras, and lit the metallic leaves
of the orange-trees occasionally with their faint
bluish light, above the scraping of the cracked
guitar, above the voices of the dancers when they
broke into the chorus of the " Gato," above the
neighing of the horses shut in the corral for

* A picazo is a black horse with a white face.

HEATHER JOCK 129

""•"-•^iggjg

fear of Indians, I seemed to hear the jangling of
the dead fool's bells, and listen to the minstrelsy,
such as it was, of the hegemonist of Bridge of
Weir.

SALVAGIA

ALMOST the most horrible doctrine ever
enunciated by theologians is, in my
opinion, the attribution of our misfortunes to
Providence. An all-wise power, all merciful and
omnipresent, enthroned somewhere in omnipo-
tence, having power over man and beast, over
earth and sky, on sea and land, able (if usually
unwilling) to suspend all natural laws, seated
above the firmament of heaven, beholding both
the evil and the good — discerning, we may sup-
pose, the former without much difficulty, and the
latter by the aid of some spectroscope at present
not revealed to men of science — sees two trains
approaching on one line, and yet does nothing
to avert the catastrophe or save the victims.
Withal, nothing consoles humanity for their mis-
fortunes like the presence of this unseen power,
which might do so much good, but which serenely
contemplates so many evils.

I have often thought that, after all, there is but
one idea at the bottom of all faiths, and that, no
matter if the divinity be called Jehovah, Allah,

130

SALVAGIA 131

Moloch, Dagon, or the Neo-Pauline Providence of
the North Britons, the worshippers seem to esteem
their deity in proportion as he disregards their
welfare.

Some have maintained that the one common
ground of all the sects was in the offertory ; but
more recent reflection has convinced me that the
impassibility of Providence provides a spiritual,
if unconscious, nexus which unites in one common
bond Jews, Christians (whether Coptic, Aybssin-
ian, Greek, or Roman), Mohammedans, Buddhists,
the Church of England, with that of Scotland, and
the multitudinous sects of Nonconformists, who,
scattered over two hemispheres, yet hate one
another with enough intensity to enable mankind
to perceive that they have comprehended to the
full the doctrines of the New Testament.

I know a little village in the country generally
described in old Italian maps under the title of
" Salvagia," where the providential scheme is held
in its entirety. Nothing, at first sight, proclaims
the fact why a great power should specially con-
cern itself about the place. Still, is it not the case
that, as a rule, blear-eyed, knock-kneed young
men imagine that they touch the heart of every
woman who pities their infirmities ? Do not red-
haired and freckled, cow-houghed maidens usually
attend a fancy ball attired as Mary Queen of
Scots, and think their fatal beauty deals destruc-
tion on the sons of men, unconscious that their
lack of charms preserves them safe from those

132 SALVAGIA

temptations by means of which alone virtue can
manifest itself ? That which holds good of
individuals often applies to people in the bulk.
So of my village in Salvagia. A straggling'street
looking upon a moor, bordered by slated living
boxes, each with its " jaw-box " at the door and
midden at the back, its ugly strip of garden with-
out flowers, in which grew currants, gooseberries,
with nettles, docks, potatoes, and the other fruits
known to the tender North.

In every house a picture of Dr. Chalmers
flanked by one of Bunyan, and a Bible ever ready
on a table for advertisement, as when a minister
or charitable lady calls, and the cry is heard of
" Jeanie, rax the Bible doon, and pit the whiskey-
bottle in the aumrie." Two churches and two
public-houses, and a feud between the congre-
gations of each church as bitter as that between
the clients of the rival inns. No whiskey or no
doctrine from the opposing tavern or conventicle
could possibly be sound. No trees, no flowers,
no industry, except the one of keeping idiots sent
from Glasgow, and known to the people as the
" silly bodies." Much faith and little charity,
the tongue of every man wagging against his
neighbour like a bell-buoy on a shoal. At the
street corner groups of men stand spitting.
Expectoration is a national sport throughout
Salvagia. Women and children are afraid to
pass them by. Not quite civilised t nor yet quite
savages, a set of demi-brutes, exclaiming, if a

SALVAGIA 133

woman in a decent gown goes past, " There goes
a bitch."

A school, of course, wherein the necessary means
of getting on in life is taught. O education, how
a people may be rendered brutish in thy name !
Behold Salvagia ! In every town, in every
hamlet, even in the crofting communities upon the
coast, where women till the fields and men stand
idle prating of natural rights, the poorest man can
read and write, knows history and geography,
arithmetic up to the Rule of Three — in fact,
sufficiently to over-reach his neighbour in the
affairs of life.

Still, in the social scale of human intercourse
the bovine dweller in East Anglia is a prince
compared to him. How the heart shrinks, in
travelling from London, when, the Border passed,
the Scottish porter with a howl sticks his head into
the carriage and bellows " Tackets — are ye gaeing
North ? " No doubt the man is better educated
than his southern colleague, but as you see him
once, and have no time to learn his inward grace,
his lack of outward polish jars upon you. After
the porter comes the group of aged men at Locker-
bie, all seated in the rain, precisely as their for-
bears sat when Carlyle lived at his lone farm upon
the moor. Then come barefooted boys selling the
Daily Mail, the Herald, and Review, till Glasgow
in its horror and its gloom receives you, and you
lose all hope.

Throughout Salvagia " Thank you " and " if

134 SALVAGIA

you please " are terms unknown. In railway
trains we spit upon the floor and wipe our boots
upon the cushions, just to show our independence ;
in cars and omnibuses take the best seats, driving
the weaker to the wall like cattle in a pen. In
streets we push the women into the gutters, " It's
only just a woman " being our excuse. Our
hearts we wear so distant from our sleeves that
the rough frieze of which our coats are made
abrades the cuticle of every one it rubs.

Back to our village — " Gart-na-cloich," I think
the name, meaning the enclosure of the stones.
Stony indeed the country, stony the folks, the
language, manners, and all else pertaining to it.
Even the Parameras outside Avila, where every
boulder is a tear that Jesus wept, is not more
sterile. Not that Jesus had ever aught to do with
Gart-na-cloich. The deity worshipped there is
Dagon, or some superfetated Moloch born in
Geneva.

In no Salvagian village is there any room for a
gentle God. " Nane of your Peters ; gie me
Paul," is constantly in everybody's mouth, for
every dweller in Salvagia studies theology.
Faith is our touchstone, and good works are
generally damned throughout the land as rank
Erastianism. Only believe, that is sufficient.
" Show me your moral man," exclaims the
preacher, " and I will straight demolish him " ;
the congregation nod assent, being convinced
" your moral man " is not a dweller in Salvagia,

SALVAGIA 135

or, if he was, that the profession of a " cold
morality " on earth must lead to everlasting fire,
in the only other world they hear of in the kirk.
Our sexual immorality, and the high rate of
illegitimacy, we explain thus. No thrifty man
would buy a barren beast. Therefore, as we
cannot buy our wives and sell them, if they prove
unprofitable, 'tis well to try them in advance,
and as our law follows the Pandects of Justinian,
being more merciful to those who come into a
hard world through no fault of their own than
that of England, the matter is put right after a
year or so, and all are pleased. That which a
thing is worth, is what it brings, we teach our
children from their earliest days ; we inculcate
it in our schools, at mart and fair, in church, at
bed and board, and that accounts for the hide-
bound view we take of everything. Anger and
love move us not much : we seldom come to blows
after the fashion of the people in the mysterious
region that we call " up about England/' A
stand-up fight with knock-down blows is not our
way, not for the lack of courage but from excess
of caution and the knowledge that we have in-
tuitively that calumny kills further off than blows.
How we get married is a mystery I have never
solved, for no Salvagian ever seems heartily to
wish for anything, or, if he does, is far too cautious
to make his wishes known. Perhaps that is the
reason why the Germans drive us out from busi-
ness as easily as the Norwegian rat expels the

136 SALVAGUA

original black rat, or the European extirpates the
natives of Australia.

Withal, we have our qualities, but well con-
cealed, and only to be found after a residence of
fifty years within our gates. In spite of kail-
yard tales, we snivel little, and cant not much
more than our neighbours do ; and we have
humour, though the kail-yarders record it not,
for fear of troubling the Great Heart which only
likes " a joke," and is impervious either to humour
or to wit. Sometimes we have a touch of pathos
in our composition which startles, coming as it
does from an unlikely source.

In Gart-na-cloich there dwelt one Mistress
Campbell, a widow and the mother of four sons,
all what we call " weel-doing " lads — that is, not
given to drink, good workers, attenders at the
church, and not of those who pass their " Saw-
bath " lounging about and spitting as they
criticise mankind.

Going to church with us replaces charity —
that is, it covers an infinity of things. A man
may cheat and drink, be cruel to animals, avarici-
ous, anything you please, so that he goes to church
he still remains a Christian and enters heaven by
his faith alone. Our faith we take from " Paul,"
our doctrine from Hippo, so that we need do
nought but bow the knee to our own virtues, and
be sure that we are saved.

No one could say that Mistress Campbell's
cottage was neat or picturesque. No roses climb-

SALVAGIA 137

ed the walls, nor did the honeysuckle twine round
the eaves. For flowers a ragged mullein growing
in a wall, a plant of rue, one of " old man," with
camomile and gillyflowers, did duty. Apple and
damson trees grew round the " toon/' the fruit
of which was bitter as a sloe. Beside the door the
cheesestone with its iron ring, a "stoup" for water
shaped like a little barrel, a " feal " spade, and a
rusty sickle lying in the mud, gave promise of the
interior graces of the house.

Inside the acrid smell of peat, with rancid
butter, and the national smell of whiskey spilt
and left to dry, assailed your nose.

All round the kitchen stood press beds in
which the children slept. Before the fire grey
woollen stockings dried whilst scones were baking,
and underneath the table lay a collie dog or two
snapping at flies.

The inner chamber had the peculiar musty
smell of rarely opened rooms. Upon the walls a
picture of Jerusalem set forth in a kind of uphill
view, was balanced by a sampler which may have
been the Ten Commandments, the Maze at Hamp-
ton Court, the Fountains at Versailles, or almost
anything you chose, according to your view. Not
tidy or convenient was the house, but still a home
of the peculiar kind that race and climate has made
acceptable.

The widow's faith was great, her household linen
clean, and her chief pride, after her sons, was
centred in her cows, called in Salvagia " kye."

138 SALVAGUA

She liked to sit in church and fall asleep, as pious
people do during the sermon. Seated between
her sons, her Bible in a handkerchief scented with
lavender, she had the faith not merely able to
move mountains, but with her Bible for a lever,
had she but got a fulcrum, to move the world
itself. She knew her Church was right, the others
wrong, and that sufficed her ; and, for the rest,
she did her duty to her sons and cows and to her
neighbours.

Years passed by, the world wagged pretty much
as usual in Gart-na-cloich ; sometimes a neigh-
bour died, and we enjoyed his funeral in the way
we love, whilst listening in the house of woe to the
set phrases of the minister which use has con-
stituted a sort of liturgy.

Winter succeeded summer, and day night,
without a thing to break the dreary life we
think the best of lives because we know none
else.

Years sat but lightly upon Mistress Campbell,
for she had reached the time of life when country-
women in Salvagia seem to mummify and time
does nothing on them. Her sons grew up, her
cows continued to give milk, the rent was paid in
season. Nothing disturbed her life, and folk
began almost to murmur against Providence for
His neglect to visit her.

Then came a season with the short, fierce spell
of heat which goes before the thunderstorm, and
constitutes our summer. In every burn the

SALVAGIA 139

£V -

children paddled, trout gasped, and cattle sought
a refuge from the midges in the stream.

A little river, in which before the days of
knowledge, kelpies were wont to live, flows past
the town.

Its glory is a pool (we call it linn) known as the
Linn-a-Hamish. Here the stream spreads out
and babbling in its course wears the stones flat
as proverbs in the current of men's speech get
broadened out. The boys delight to throw these
flat stones edgeways in the air, to hear the
curious muffled sound they make when falling in
the water, which they call a " dead man's bell."

Alders fringe the bank, and in the middle of the
pool a little grassy promontory juts out, on which
cows stand swinging their tails, and meditate, to
at least as good a purpose as philosophers. The
linn lies dark and sullen, and a line of bubbles
rising to the top shows where the under-current
runs below the stream. In a lagoon a pike has
basked for the last thirty years. In our myth-
ology, one Hamish met his death in the dark
water, but why or wherefore no one seems to
know. Tradition says the place is dangerous,
and the country people count it a daring feat to
swim across.

There the four sons of Mistress Campbell went
to bathe, and all were drowned. Passing the
village, I heard the Celtic Coronach, which lingers
to show us how our savage ancestors wailed for
their dead, and to remind us that the step which

i4o SALVAGIA

separates us from the other animals is short. I
asked a woman for whom the cry was raised.
She answered, " For the four sons of Lilias Camp-
bell." In the dull way one asks a question in
the face of any shock, I said, " What did she say
or do when they were brought home dead ? "

" Say ? " said the woman ; " nothing ; n'er a
word. She just gaed out and milked the kye."

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA

npHORGRIMUR HJALTALIN was known
throughout all Rangarvallar, down to
Krusavik, up to Akureyri, and in fact all over Ice-
land, for his wandering disposition, his know-
ledge of the Sagas, and for his horse called
" Snaekoll." He lived in Upper Horgsdalr,
near the Skaptar Jokull, and from his green
" tun " were seen the peaks of Skaptar Jokull,
Orcefar, and the white cordillera of the vast icy
Vatna.

A Scandinavian of the Scandinavians, Thor-
grimur was tall and angular, red-bearded, yellow-
haired, grey-eyed, and as deliberate in all his
movements as befits an Icelander, compared to
whom the Spaniards, Turks, Chinese, or Cholos of
the Sierras of Peru are active, quick in design and
movement, and mercurial in mind.
: -* His house was built of Norway pine with door
jambs of hard wood, floated almost to his home
from the New World. Unlike most Icelanders,
he had not profited too much by education, leaving
Greek, Latin, and the " humanities " in general
for those who liked them ; but of the Sagas he was

MI

142 SNAEKOLL'S SAdA

passionately fond, reading and learning them by
heart, copying them out of books in the long
evenings whilst his family sat working round the
lamp on winter nights after the fashion of their
land.

People were wont to say he was descended from
some Berserker, he was so silent and yet so subject
to sudden fits of passion, which came on generally
after a fit of laughter, ending in wrath or tears.
Berserkers, not a few, had lived in Rangarvallar,
and it may be that moral qualities become endemic
in localities, in the same way that practices still
cling to places, as in Rome and Oxford and some
other towns where the air seems vitiated by the
breath of generations long gone past.

Thus, in the future, when the taint of com-
merce has been purged away and the world
cleansed from all the baseness commerce brings,
it may be that for some generations those born in
London, Liverpool, in Glasgow and New York,
will for a time be more dishonest than their
fellows born in cities where trade did not so
greatly flourish, and so of other things.

Thorgrimur was married and had children, as
he had sheep, cattle, poultry, dogs, and all the
other requisites of country life. But wife and
children occupied but little of his mind, though
after the fashion of his countrymen he was kind
and gentle to them, sought no other women, did
not get drunk, gamble, or regulate his conduct
upon the pattern of the husbands of more favour-

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 143

ed lands. All his delight was to read Sagas, to
dream of expeditions through the great deserts of
his country, and his chief care was centred in his
horses, and most especially in " Snaekoll," his
favourite, known, like himself, for his peculiarities.

Whilst there are camels in the desert, llamas in
Peru, reindeer in Lapland, dogs in Greenland, and
caiques amongst the Esquimaux, Iceland will
have its ponies, who on those " Pampas of the
North " will still perform the services done by the
mustangs of the plains of Mexico, the horses of
the Tartars, Gauchos, and even more than is per-
formed by any animal throughout the world.
Without the ponies Iceland would be impossible
to live in, and when the last expires the Icelanders
have two alternatives — either to emigrate en
masse, or to construct a system of highways for
bicycles, an undertaking compared to which all
undertaken by the Romans and the Incas of
Peru in the same sphere would be as nothing.

No Icelander will walk a step if he can help it ;
when he dismounts he waddles like an alligator
on land, a Texan cowboy, or a Gaucho left
" afoot/' or like the Medes whom Plutarch repre-
sents as tottering on their toes when they dis-
mounted from their saddles and essayed to walk.
Ponies are carts, are sledges, carriages, trains —
in short, are locomotion and the only means of
transport : bales of salt fish, packages of goods,
timber projecting yards above their heads and
trailing on the ground behind like Indian lodge

10

144 SNAEKOLL'S SAGA

poles, they convey across the rocky lava tracks.
The farmer and his wife, his children, servants,
the priest, the doctor, " Syselman," all ride,
cross rivers on the ponies' backs, plunge through
the snow, slide on the icy " Jokull " paths, and
when the lonely dweller of some upland dale
expires, his pony bears his body in its coffin tied
to its back, to the next consecrated ground.

So Thorgrimur loved " Snaekoll," and was
proud of all his qualities, his size, for " Snaekoll "
almost attained to fourteen hands, a giant stature
amongst the ponies of his race. In colour he was
iron-grey, with a white foot on either side, so that
his rider had the satisfaction of riding on a cross,
fierce-tempered, bad to mount, a kicker at the
stirrup, biter, unrideable by strangers, but, as
Thorgrimur said, an " ice-eater " ; that is, able to
live on nothing and dig for lichens on the rocks
when snow lay deep, to feed upon salt cod or on
dried whale beef, and for that reason not quite
safe to leave alone with sheep when they had
lambs. But for all that Thorgrimur did not care,
and never grudged a lamb or two when he reflected
that his horse could go his fifty miles a day for a
whole week, and at the end be just as fresh as
when he left the " tun."

Thick-necked, stiff-jawed, straight pasterns
high in the withers, square in the croup, mane like
a bottle-brush, tail long and thick, " Snaekoll "
had certainly few points of beauty : still, as he
stood nodding beneath his Danish saddle, hobbled

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 145

with whale-hide hobbles, shod with shoes made by
Thorgrimur himself, stuck full of large round-
headed nails and made long at the heel and curv-
ing up near to the coronet to protect his feet in
crossing lava-fields, he had a gleam in his red eyes
like a bull terrier, which warned the stranger not
to come too near. This was a source of pride to
Thorgrimur, who used to say, with many quite
superfluous " hellvites," that his horse was fit
for " Grettir, Burnt Njal, or Viga Glum to ride ; "
then, mounting him, he used to dash full speed
over a lava-field, sending a shower of sparks under
his feet, cracking his whale-hide whip, and stop-
ping " Snaekoll " with a jerk whilst sitting loosely
with his legs stuck out after the fashion of all
horsemen when they know they are observed.

To cross the Vatna Jokull, the great icy desert,
which extends between the top of Rangarvallar
and the east coast of Berufjordr, was Thorgri-
mur's day-dream. Others had journeyed over
deserts, crossed Jokulls, as the icy upland wastes
of Iceland are called, but in his time no one had
yet been found to cross the Vatna. Now this
idea was ever present in his brain during his
lonely rides in summer from his home to Rey-
kjavik, from thence to Krusavik, or as he jogged
across the lava-fields or crossed the tracts on which
grew birch and mountain ash a foot in height,
which constitute an Icelandic forest ; and in the
winter, in the long, dark hours, he could not
drive it from his head. Men came to laugh at

146 SNAEKOLL'S SAG-A

him, as men will laugh at those who have ideas of
any kind, and call him " Thorgrimur of Vatna
Jokull, the Berserker of Rangarvallar," and the
like, but none laughed openly, for Thorgrimur
was hasty in his wrath, and apt to draw his whale
knife, or at least spur his horse " Snaekoll " at
the laugher's horse, as he had been a fighter in the
ancient horse fights, and it was lucky if the horse
that " Snaekoll " set upon escaped without some
hurt.

In fact the man was a survival, or at the least
an instance, of atavism strongly developed, or
would have been so styled in England ; but in
Iceland all such niceties were not observed, and
his compatriots merely called him mad, being
convinced of their own sanity, as men who make
good wages, go to church, observe the weather and
the stocks, read books for pastime, marry and
have large families, pay such debts as the law
forces them to pay, and never think on abstract
matters, always are convinced in every land.

Think on the matter for a moment, and at
once it is apparent they are right

The world is to the weak. The weak are the
majority. The weak of brain, of body, the knock-
kneed and flat-footed, muddle-minded, loose-
jointed, ill-put-together, baboon-faced, the white-
eye-lashed, slow of wit, the practical, the un-
imaginative, forgetful, selfish, dense, the stupid,
fatuous, the " candle-moulded/' give us our laws,
impose their standard on us, their ethics, their

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 147

philosophy, canon of art, literary style, their
jingling music, vapid plays, their dock-tailed
horses, coats with buttons in the middle of the
back ; their hideous fashions, aniline colours,
their Leaders, Leightons, Logsdails ; their false
morality, their supplemented monogamic mar-
riage, social injustice done to women ; legal
injustice that men endure, making them fearful
of the law, even with a good case when the oppo-
nent is a woman ; in sum, the monstrous in-
eptitude of modern life, with all its inequalities,
its meannesses, its petty miseries, contagious
diseases, its drink, its gambling, Grundy, Stock
Exchange, and terror of itself, we owe to those,
our pug-nosed brothers in the Lord, under whose
rule we live.

Wise Providence, no doubt, has thus ordained
it, so that each one of us can see the folly of
mankind, and fancy that ourselves alone are
strong, are wise, are prudent, faithful, handsome,
artistic, to be loved, are poets (with the gift of
rhyme left out), critics of music, literature, of
eloquence, good business men and generally so
constituted as to be fit to rule mankind had not
some cursed spite, to man's great detriment,
cozened us out of our just due. So Thorgrimur
was mad, and pondered on the crossing of the
Vatna, day by day ; not that he thought of profit
or of fame — your true explorer thinks of neither.
But like a wild goose making north in spring, or
as a swallow flying south without a chart to shape

i48 SNAEKOLL'8 SAGA

his voyage by ; or as a Seychelle cocoanut adrift
upon some oceanic current all unknown to it,
your true explorer must explore, just as the painter
paints, the poet sings, or as the sworn Salvationist
must try to save a soul, and in the trying lose
perhaps his only friend — a perilous business when
one thinks that souls are many, friends are few.

And still the Vatna Jokull rilled Thorgrimurs'
imagination. Surely, to be alone in those great
deserts would be wonderful, the stars must needs
look brighter so far away from houses, the grass
in the lone valleys greener where no animal had
cropped it, and then to sleep alone with " Snae-
koll " securely hobbled, feeding near at hand ;
and, lastly — for Thorgrimur was not devoid of true
Icelandic pride — the arrival one fine morning at
the first houses above Berufjordr, calling for milk
at the farm door, and saying airily, in answer to
the inquiry from whence he came, from Rangar-
vallar, across the Vatna. That would indeed be
worth a lifetime of mere living, after all.

Needless to say that no one in the time of Thor-
grimur had ever passed over the Vatna from Ran-
garvallar, though the Heimskringla seemed to
indicate that at the first settlement there had been
such a road. Reindeer were known to haunt the
wild recesses of the desert track, and some said,
ponies long escaped had there run wild, and all
were well aware that evil spirits haunted the
valleys, for there the older gods had all retired
when Christianity had triumphed in the land.

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 149

Two hundred miles in distance, but then the
miles were mortal, without food, perhaps no
water, without a guide, except the compass and
the stars. Seven days' ride on " Snaekoll," if
all went well, and if it did not, why then as well
to sleep alone amongst the mountains, as in the
fat churchyard, for there men when they see your
headstone growing green forget you, but he who
dies in the lone Vatna surely keeps his memory
ever fresh.

All through the winter, Thorgrimur talked
ceaselessly about the execution of his dream. In
spring, when grass is green and horses fat,
when forests of dwarf birch and willow look like
fields of corn, ice disappears and valleys as by
magic are all clothed with grass, he made all
bound to set out on his long-projected ride.
" Snaekoll is eight years old (he said) and in his
prime, sound both in wind and limb, and I am
thirty, and if we cannot now prove ourselves
of the true Icelandic breed the time will never
come, old age will catch us both still scheming,
still a-planning, and men will say that had we
lived among the Icelanders of old, Snaekoll
had been of no use at the horse-fighting, and I,
instead of going a sea-roaming with Viga Glum,
with Harold Fair-hair, Askarpillir, with Asgrim,
and the rest, would have remained at home and
helped the women spin." His wife, after the
practical way of womenkind, thought him a fool,
but yet admired him, for she imagined that

150 SNAEKOLL'S SAGA

Thorgrimur in reading Sagas had come upon the
whereabouts of some great treasure buried in
times gone by, for she could- not imagine that a
man would risk his life without good reason,
being all unaware that generally lives are risked
and lost without a cause. Perhaps, too, she was
willing enough for Thorgrimur to go, his musings,
readings, wanderings, and uncanny ways render-
ing him an unpleasant inmate of the house.

But Thorgrimur cared nothing, or perhaps
knew nothing of her speculations, but got his
saddle freshly stuffed, made whale-hide reins
strong, new, and six feet long ; purveyed a long
hair rope, new hobbles, and for himself new whale-
hide shoes like Indians' mocassins, new wadmal
clothes, and laid up a provision of salt fish and
rye-flour bread all ready for the start.

News travels fast in Iceland, as it does in
Arabia, the Steppes of Russia, in Patagonia and
other countries where there are no newspapers
and where wayfaring men, even though fools,
pass news along with such rapidity that it appears
there is no need of telegraphs or telephones, for
what is done in one part of the land to-day is
known to-morrow miles away, and just as much
distorted as it had been disseminated through the
medium of the Press. Thus Rangarvallar and
all southern Iceland knew of Thorgrimur's in-
tention, and people came from far and near to
visit him, for time in Iceland is held valuable, or
at the least folk think it so, and, therefore, spend

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 151

what they prize most after the fashion that most
pleases them, and that by talking ceaselessly,
mostly of nothing, though they can work as
patiently as beavers, when they choose. And
thus it came about that at the little church in
Upper Horgsdalr a crowd of neighbours had
assembled to see the start of Thorgrimur into the
unknown wastes.

To say the truth the church was of as mean a
presence as was the author of the most part of the
faith expounded in its walls. Built all of rubble,
roof of Norway pine, the little shingled steeple
shaped like a radish, nothing about the building,
but the bell cast centuries ago in Denmark,
could be called beautiful ; but still it served its
turn and as a mosque in a lone " duar " in
Morocco, stood always open for the faithful to
use by day for prayer, and as a sleeping-place at
night. In the churchyard, curiously marked
and patterned stones bore witness to the sup-
posititious virtues of those long dead, and from
the mound on which the church was built, the
view extended far across lava-fields over the
reddish mountains flecked here and there with
green and crowned with snow, and in the dis-
tance rose the glaciers and the peaks of the un-
known and icy Vatna. A landscape dreary in
itself, unclothed by trees, wild, desolate, and only
beautiful when the sun's rays transformed it,
turning the peaks to castles, blotting the black
and ragged lava out, and blending all into a vast

152 SNAEKOLL'S SAGA

prismatic play of colour, changing and shifting
as the lights ran over limestone, rested on basalt,
and lit the granite of the cliffs, making each small-
est particle to shine like mica in a piece of quartz.
The Icelanders do not hold Sunday as a day of
gloom, devoted, as it used to be in England and
still remains in the remoter parts of Scotland to
which the beneficent breath of latter-day indiffer-
ence has not yet penetrated, sacred to prayer and
drink. So Sunday was the day on which Thor-
grimur intended to set out ; dressed in his best he
sat at church, his wife and children seated by his
side. The service done, he left the church, and
pushing through the ponies all waiting for
their owners outside the door, entered his
house.

The priest, the " Syselman," the notables, and
friends from far and near sat down to dine, and
dinner over and the corn brandy duly circulating,
Thorgrimur rose up to speak. " My friends, and
you the priest and ' Syselman/ and you the
notables, and neighbours who have known me
from a boy, I drink your health. I go to try
what I have dreamed of all my life ; whether I
shall succeed no man can tell, but still I shall
succeed so far in that I have had the opportunity
to follow out my dream. I hold that dreams are
the reality of life and that which men call practical,
that which down there in Reykjavik the folk call
business, is but a dream. * Snaekoll ' and I
depart to cross the Vatna, perhaps not to return,

SNAEKOLL' 8 SAGA 153

but still to try, and so I drink your health again
and say farewell, ' Skoal/ to you all."

Then mounting " Snaekoll," who stood arching
up his back, he kissed his wife, and saying to his
children, " Stand aside, for ' Snaekoll ' bites worse
than a walrus," he took the road. His friends
rode with him for a " thingmanslied " upon the
way, and when the last few scattered farms were
passed and the track ended in a rising lava-field
stretching to the hills, bade him God-speed and
watched him sitting erect on " Snaekoll " fade
into nothing upon the lava-fields, his horse first
sinking out of sight and then his body, bit by bit,
till he was gone. The priest, spurring his horse
upon a rocky hill, claimed to have seen him last,
and said that Thorgrimur never once looked
behind, but rode into the desert as he was riding
to his home, and that he fancied as he saw him
ride, he saw the last of the old Berserks disappear.
And then the Vatna claimed him, and Thorgri-
mur of Rangarvallar went his way out of this
story and the world's.

But in east Berufjordr, not far from Hargifoss,
there dwelt one Hiortr Helagson, a man of sub-
stance, owner of flocks and herds, and as he sat one
morning at his " baer " door, drinking his coffee
sweetened with lumps of sugar-candy in the Ice-
landic fashion, waiting until his horse was caught
to ride to church, his herdsman entered to inform
him that he thought " Hellvite," the devil had
got amongst the horses, for he said, " they run

i54 SNAEKOLL'S SAGA

about as if in fear, and the dark chestnut which
you ride has a piece bitten out of his back as by a
wolf." Then Hiortr Helagson, although the
" Syselman " of Berufjordr and elder of the
Church, swore like a horseman when he knows his
horse is sick or come by mischief, and, taking
down his gun, went to the pasture where his horses
fed. The horses all were running to and fro like
sheep, and in the corner of the field an object lay,
dark grey in colour, like a Greenland bear. But
when the " Syselman " had raised his gun, it
staggered to its feet, and he, on looking at it, said
to his herdsman, " Ansgottes, this is the horse of
Thorgrimur of Rangarvallar ; he must be dead
amongst the ice-fields, and his horse has wandered
here." Time passed and " Snaekoll " once
again grew round and sleek, although a pest to
all the horses in the " tun," and Hiortr, thinking
to cut a figure at a cattle fair, saddled and mounted
him. " Snaekoll " stood still, though looking
backwards, and when the " Syselman " was
seated on his back, arching his spine, the horse
plunged violently, and coming down with legs
as stiff as posts, gave Hiortr Helagson a heavy
fall, and — turning on him like a tiger — would
have killed him had not help been nigh. So,
from that day, no one essayed to ride the dead
man's horse, who ranged about the fields, and,
after years, slept with the horses of the Valkyrie.
But Hiortr Helagson had the best ponies in all
Berufjordr, hardy, untirable, and " ice-eaters,"

SNAEKOLL'S SAGA 155

fiery in spirit, hard to mount, kickers and biters,
apt to rear and plunge, fit for the saddle only of
such few commentators as can catch the stirrup
at the moment they are up. And when the
neighbours talked about their temper and their
ways, Hiortr would say, " Well, yes, they are
descended from the horse of Thorgrimur of
Rangarvallar ; his name was ' Snaekoll/ and he
came to me out of the desert, lean as a bear in
spring. You know his master died trying to
cross the Vatna, and ' Snaekoll ' how he lived
amongst the ice and found his way to Berufjordr,
I cannot tell. Up in the Vatna there is naught
but ice, and yet he must have eaten something ;
what it was, God knows ! "

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND

AS we never associated William Morris with
fine weather, taking him rather to be a
pilot poet lent by the Vikings to steer us from the
Doldrums in which we now lie all becalmed in
smoke to some Valhalla of his own creation
beyond the world's end, it seemed appropriate
that on his burial-day the rain descended and the
wind blew half a gale from the north-west.

Amongst the many mysteries of enigmatic
England few have more puzzled me than our
attitude towards our rare great men. No one
can say that in our streets they jostle other
passengers, pushing the average man into the
gutter, which is his own estate. Neither in
Church or State, or in religion, the Press, the
army, amongst the licensed victuallers, or at
the Bar, do they abound so much as to take the
profits of the various jobs I have referred to,
from their weaker foes. It may be that we think
them " blacklegs/' working, so to speak, for too
long hours at too high pressure ; it may be that
the Democratic sentiment, of which we hear so
much and see so little, thinks them, as Gracchus

156

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND 157

Babeuf did, nothing but " aristos " sent by an
unjust God (himself a ci-devant) to trample on us.

Genius in England is a thing accursed, and
that it is unpleasing even to the creator of all
Englishmen is manifest by the marked dis-
approval shown to it by the majority of the
created. Therefore, I take it in the future, as
the vote has, so to speak, been taken by the show
of sneers, that we shall not be called upon to
stand much more of it.

So the rain descended, and the north-west wind
battled and strove amongst the trees and chimney-
tops, swirling the leaves and hats into the mud,
making one think upon the fisherfolk, the men
aboard the ocean tramps, the shepherds in the
glens of Inverness-shire, upon the ranchmen out
on the open prairie riding round the cattle, and
on the outcasts of the El Dorado, crouching the
livelong night under some Christian bridge or
philanthropic railway arches.

I have a standing quarrel with " le grand
capricieux " called Providence, but at a funeral
it generally appears he does his best so to dispose
the weather that the principal shall not regret
the climate he has left. Seen through the gloom
at Paddington, within the station, moving about
like fish in an aquarium, were gathered those few
faithful ones whom England had sent forth to
pay respect to the most striking figure of our
times.

Artists and authors, archaeologists, with men

158 WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND

of letters, Academicians, the pulpit, stage, the
Press, the statesmen, craftsmen, and artificers,
whether of books, or of pictures, or ideas, all
otherwise engaged.

Philanthropists agog about Armenia, Cuba,
and Crete, spouting of Turks and infidels and
foreign cruelties, whilst he who strove for years
for Englishmen lay in a railway van.

The guilds were absent, with the Trades Unions
and the craftsmen, the hammermen, the weavers,
matchmakers, and those for whom he wrought.

Not that he was forgotten of those with whom
he lived ; for in a little group, forlorn, dishevelled,
and their eyes grown dim with striving for the
coming of the change, stood his own faithful house
carles from Hammersmith, and they too followed
their master to the end — standing upon the plat-
form, as it were, on the brink of some new country
over which they saw, but knew they could not
reach.

When a great man dies in other countries all
his last wishes are disregarded, even his family
shrinks into second rank, and he becomes the
property of those who in his life flung mud at
or neglected him. Outbursts of cant, oceans of
snivel, are let loose upon his memory, so that it
may be that in this instance our Saxon stodginess
preserved us from some folly and bad taste.
Yet I would have liked to see a crowd of people
in the streets, at least a crowd of workmen, if
but to mark the absence of the dead man's friends.

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND 159

Thus moralising, the train slipped from the plat-
form as a sledge slips through the snow, and in
the carriage I found myself seated between some
" revolutionaries."

Had they been cultured folk, it.is ten to one the
talk had run upon the colour of the dead man's
shirt, his boots, his squashy hat, and other things
as worthy of remark.

Bourgeois et gens de peu, seated upon the hard,
straight seats provided by the thoughtful company
to mark the difference betwixt the passengers it
lives off and those it cringes to, we moralised,
each in our fashion, upon the man himself.

Kindly but choleric the verdict was ; apt to
break into fury, easily appeased, large-hearted,
open-handed, and the " sort of bloke you always
could depend on," so said the " comrades," and
it seemed to me their verdict was the one I should
have liked upon myself.

So we reached Oxford, and found upon the
platform no representatives of that old Trades
Union there to greet us, and no undergraduates
to throng the station, silently standing to watch
the poet's funeral. True it was Long Vacation ;
but had the body of some Buluwayo Burglar
happened to pass, they all had been there. The
ancient seat of pedantry, where they manu-
facture prigs as fast as butchers in Chicago
" handle hogs," was all unmoved.

Sleeping the sleep of the self-satisfied were dons
and masters and the crew of those who, if they

u

i6o WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND

chance once in a century to have a man of genius
amongst them, are all ashamed of him.

Sleeping but stertorous, the city lay girt in its
throng of jerry buildings, quite out of touch
with all mankind, keeping its sympathy for
piffling commentators on Menander ; a bottler-up
of learning for the rich with foolish regulations,
a Laodicea which men like Morris long ago cast
from their mouths and mind.

So the storm went with us to Witney, which
seems as little altered as when the saying was,
" A badger and a Witney man you can tell them
by their coat." Arrived at Lechlade, for the
first time it appeared the ceremony was fitted for
the man.

No red-faced men in shabby black to stagger
with the coffin to the hearse, but in their place
four countrymen in moleskin bore the body to
an open haycart, all festooned with vines, with
alder, and with bulrushes, and driven by a man
who looked coeval with the Saxon Chronicle.
And still the north-west wind bent trees and
bushes, turned back the leaves of the bird
maples upon their footstalks, making them look
like poplars. The rain beat on the straggling
briars, showering the leaves of guelder roses down
like snow ; the purple fruit of privet and ripe
hips and haws hung on the bushes with the lurid
look that berries only seem to have struggling
through wreaths of bryony and Traveller's Joy
and all the tangles of an unplashed hedge border-

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND 161

ing a country lane in rural England. Along the
road a line of slabs of stone extended, reminding
one of Portugal ; ragweed and loosestrife, with
rank hemp agrimony, were standing dry and dead,
like reeds beside a lake, and in the rain and wind
the yokels stood at the cross-roads or at the open-
ings of the bridle-paths. Somehow they seemed
to feel that one was gone who thought of them,
and our driver said, " We've lost a dear good
friend in Master Morris ; I've driven him myself
'underds of miles." No funeral carriages, but
country flys driven by red-faced men in mole-
skins, carried the mourners, and in a pony cart
a farmer, with a face as red as are the bottles in a
chemist's window, brought up the rear, driving
his shaggy pony with the air of one who drives a
hearse.

Through Lechlade, with its Tudor church,
its gabled houses roofed with Winsford slates
all overgrown with houseleek and with lichens,
and with the stalks of wallflower and valerian
projecting from the chinks, we took our way.

There, unlike Oxford, the whole town was out,
and from the diamond-pained and bevelled win-
dows gazed children in their print dresses and sun-
bonnets which Morris must have loved. Then
Farmer Hobbs' van drew up before the little
church which is now rendered famous by the
description of the illustrious man who sleeps so
close to it. The row of limes, flagged walks, the
ample transept and square porch, the row of

162 WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND

sun-dials down the wall, most with their gnomons
lost, is known to all the world.

{Time has dealt leniently with it, and the
Puritans have stayed their fury at the little cross
upon the tower.

ilnside, the church was decorated for a harvest
festival, the lamps all wreathed with ears of oats
and barley, whilst round the font and in the
porch lay pumpkins, carrots, and sheaves of corn
— a harvest festival such as Morris perhaps had
planned, not thinking he himself would be the
chief est firstfruit.

Standing amongst the wet grass of the graves,
artists and Socialists, with friends, relations,
and the casual spectators, a group of yokels faced
us, gaping at nothing, after the fashion of them-
selves and of their animals. And then I fancied
for a moment that the strong oak coffin, with its
wrought-iron handles and pall of Anatolian velvet,
was opened, and I saw the waxen face and features
of the dead man circled by his beard, and in his
shroud, his hands upon his breast, looking like
some old Viking in his sleep beside the body of his
favourite horse, at the opening of some mound
beside the sea in Scandinavia.

So dust to dust fell idly on my ears, and in its
stead a vision of the England which he dreamed
of filled my mind. The little church grew brighter,
looking as it were filled with the spirit of a fuller
faith embodied in an ampler ritual.

John Ball stood by the grave, with him a band

WITH THE NORTH-WEST WIND 163

of archers all in Lincoln green ; birds twittered
in the trees, and in the air the scent of apple-
blossom and white hawthorn hung. All was much
fairer than I had ever seen the country look,
fair with a fairness that was never seen in England
but by the poet, and yet a fairness with which he
laboured to endue it. Once more the mist des-
cended, and my sight grew dimmer ; the England
of the Fellowship was gone, John Ball had vanish-
ed, with him the archers, and in their place re-
mained the knot of countrymen, plough-galled
and bent with toil ; the little church turned
greyer, as if a reformation had passed over it. I
looked again, the bluff, bold, kindly face had
faded into the north-west wind.

NIGGERS

JAHVE created all things, especially the
world in which we live, and which is really
the centre of the universe, in the same way as
England is the centre of the planet, and as the
Stock Exchange is the real centre of all England,
despite the dreams of the astronomers and the
economists. He set the heavens in their place,
bridled the sea, disposed the tides, the phases of
the moon, made summer, winter, and the seasons
in their due rotation, showed us the constant resur-
rection of the day after the death of night, sent
showers, hail, frost, snow, thunder and lightning,
and the other outward manifestations of his power
to serve, to scourge, or to affright us, according to
his will.

Under the surface of our world he set the
minerals, metals, the coal, and quicksilver, with
platinum, gold, and copper, and let his diamonds
and rubies, with sapphires, emeralds, and the
rest, as topazes, jacinths, peridots, sardonyx,
tourmalines, or chrysoberyls, take shape and
colour, and slowly carbonise during the ages.

Upon the upper crust of the great planet he
164

NIGGERS 165

caused the plants to grow, the trees, bushes of
every kind, from the hard, cruciform-leaved
carmamoel,* to the pink-flowering Siberian willow.
Palm-trees and oaks, ash, plane, and sycamore,
with churchyard yew, and rowan, holly, jacar-
anda, greenheart and pines, larch, willow, and all
kinds of trees that flourish, rot, and die unknown
in tropic forests, unplagued by botanists, with
their pestilent Pinus Smithii or Cupressus Hig-
ginbottomiana, rustled their leaves, swayed up
and down their branches, and were content,
fearing no axe. Canebrakes and mangrove
swamps ; the immeasurable extension of the
Steppes, Pampas, and Prairies, and the frozen
Tundras of the north ; stretches of ling and
heather, with bees buzzing from flower to flower,
larks soaring into heaven above them ; acres of
red verbena in the Pampa ; lilies and irises in
Africa, and the green-bluish sage brush desert of
the middle prairies of America ; cactus and
tacuaras, with istle and maguey, flax, hemp,
esparto, and the infinite variety of the composite,
all praised his name.

Again, in the Sahara, in the Kalahari desert,
in the Libyan sands, and Iceland, he denied
almost all vegetation, and yet his work seemed
good to those his creatures — Arabs, Bosjemen,
reindeer, and Arctic foxes, with camels, ostriches,
and eider ducks, who peopled his waste spaces.

* Colletia Cruciata.

i66 NIGGERS

He breathed his breath into the nostrils of the
animals, giving them understanding, feeling,
power of love and hatred, speech after their
fashion, love of offspring (if logic and anatomy
hold good), souls and intelligence, whether he
made their bodies biped or quadruped, after his
phantasy. Giraffes and tigers, with jerboas,
grey soft chinchillas, elephants, armadillos and
sloths, ant-eaters, marmots, antelopes, and the
fast-disappearing bison of America, gnus, spring-
boks and hartbeest, ocelot and kangaroo, bears
(grisly and cinnamon), tapirs and wapiti, he made
for man to shoot, to torture, to abuse, to profit
by, and to demonstrate by his conduct how
inferior in his conception of how to use his life
he is to them.

All this he did and rested, being glad that he
had done so much, and called a world into exist-
ence that seemed likely to be good. But even
he, having begun to work, was seized with a sort
of " cacoethes operandi," and casting about to
make more perfect what, in fact, needed no
finishing touch, he took his dust and, breathing on
it, called up man. This done he needed rest again,
and having set the sun and moon just in the right
position to give light by day and night to England,
he recollected that a week had passed. That is
to say, he thought of time, and thinking, made
and measured it, not knowing, or perhaps not
caring, that it was greater than himself ; for,
had he chanced to think about the matter,

NIGGERS 167

perchance, he had never chosen to create it, and
then our lives had been immeasurable, and our
capacity for suffering even more infinite than at
present, that is, if " infinite " admits comparison.
However, time being once created and man
imagined (but not yet perfected), and, therefore,
life the heavy burden being opposed on him, the
Lord, out of His great compassion, gave us death,
the compensating boon which makes life tolerable.

But to return to man. How, when, why,
wherefore, whether in derision of himself, through
misconception, inadvertence, or sheer malignity,
he created man, is still unknown. With the true
instinct of a tyrant (or creator, for both are one),
he gave us reason to a certain power, disclosed
his acts up to a certain point, but left the motives
wrapped in mystery. Philosophers and theologi-
ans, theosophists, positivists, clairvoyants,
necromancers, cabalists, with Rosicrucians and
alchemists, and all the rabble rout of wise and
reverend reasoners from Thales of Miletus down to
Nietzsche, have reasoned, raved, equivocated,
and contradicted one another, framed their
cosmogonies, arcana, written their gospels and
Korans, printed their Tarot packs, been martyred,
martyred others (fire the greatest syllogist on
earth), and we no wiser.

Still man exists, black, white, red, yellow, and
the Pintos of the State of Vera Cruz. A rare in-
vention, wise conception, and the quintessence
of creative power rendered complete by practice,

168 NIGGERS

for we must see that even an all-wise, all-powerful
God (like ours) matures as time goes on.

An animal erect upon its feet, its eyes well
placed, its teeth constructed to masticate all
kinds of food, its brain seemingly capable of some
development, its hearing quick, endowed with
soul, and with its gastric juices so contained as to
digest fish, flesh, grain, fruit, and stand the in-
roads of all schools of cookery, was a creative
masterpiece. So all was ready and the play-
ground delivered over beautiful to man, for men
to make it hideous and miserable.

Alps, Himalayas, Andes, La Plata, and Vistula,
Amazon, with Mississippi, Yangtsekiang and
Ganges, Volga, Rhine, Elbe and Don ; Hecla
and Stromboli, Pichincha, and Cotopaxi, with the
Istacihuatl and Lantern of Maracaibo ; seas,
White and Yellow, with oceans, Pacific and At-
lantic ; great inland lakes as Titicaca, Ladoga,
all the creeks, inlets, gulfs and bays, the plains,
the deserts, geysers, hot springs on the Yellow-
stone, Pitch Lake of Trinidad, and, to be brief, the
myriad wonders of the world, were all awaiting
newly created man, waiting his coming forth
from out the bridal chamber between the Tigris
and Euphrates, like a mad bridegroom to run
his frenzied course. Then came the (apparent)
lapsus in the Creator's scheme. That the first
man in the fair garden by the Euphrates was
white, I think, we take for granted. True that we
have no information on the subject, but in this

169

matter of creation we have entered, so to speak,
into a tacit compact with the creator, and it
behoves us to concur with him and help him when
a difficulty looms.

Briefly I leave the time when man contended
with the mastodon, hunted the mammoth, or
was hunted in his turn by plesiosaurus or by
pterodactyl. Scanty indeed are the records
which survive of the Stone Age, the Bronze, or
of the dwellers in the wattled wigwams on the
lakes. Suffice it that the strong preyed on the
weak, as they still do to-day in happy England,
and that early dwellers upon earth seem to have
thought as much as we do how to invent appli-
ances with which to kill their foes.

The Hebrew Scriptures, and the record of
crimes of violence and bad faith committed by
the Jews on other races need not detain us, as
they resemble so entirely our own exploits
amongst the " niggers " of to-day. I take it
that Jahve was little taken up with any of his
creatures, except the people who inhabited the
countries from which the Aryans came. As-
syrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and
the rest were no doubt useful and built pyramids,
invented hanging gardens, erected towers,
observed the stars, spoke the truth (if their
historians lie not), drew a good bow, and rode
like centaurs or like Gauchos. What did it
matter when all is said and done ? They were
all " niggers," and whilst they fought and con-

i7o NIGGERS

quered, or were conquered, bit by bit the race
which God had thought of from the first, slowly
took shape.

A doubt creeps in. Was the creator omnis-
cient in this case, or did our race compel him,
force his hand, containing in itself those elements
of empire which he may have overlooked ?
'Twere hard to say, but sometimes philosophers
have whispered that the Great Power, working,
as he did, without the healthy stimulus of com-
petition, was careless. I leave this speculation
as more fit for thimbleriggers, for casuists, for
statisticians, metaphysicians, or the idealistic
merchant, than for serious men.

Somehow or other the Aryans spread through
Europe, multiplied, prospered, and possessed the
land. Europe was theirs, for Finns and Basques
are not worth counting, being, as it were, a sort of
European " niggers/* destined to disappear.
Little by little out of the mist of barbarism Greece
emerged. Homer and Socrates, with Xenophon,
Euripides, Pindar and Heraclitus, Bion, Anaxi-
mander, Praxiteles, with Plato, Pericles, and all
the rest of the poets and thinkers, statesmen and
philosophers, who in that little state carried the
triumphs of the human intellect, at least as far as
any who came after them, flourished, and died.
Material and bourgeois Rome, wolf suckled on its
seven hills, waxed and became the greatest power,
conquering the world by phrases as its paltry
" Civis Romanus," and by its " Pax Romana,"

NIGGERS 171

and with the spade, and by the sheer dead weight
of commonplace, filling the office in the old world
that now is occupied so worthily by God's own
Englishmen. Then came the waning of the Im-
perial City, its decay illumined but by the genius
of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter. Whether
the new religion which the pipe-clayed soldier
Constantine adopted out of policy, first gave the
blow, or whether, as said Pliny, that the Lati-
fundia were the ruin of all Italy, or if the effemin-
acy which luxury brings with it made the Roman
youths resemble the undersized, hermaphroditic
beings who swarm in Paris and in London, no one
knows.

Popes and Republics, Lombards, Franks and
Burgundians, with Visigoths and Huns, and the
phantasmagoria of hardly-to-be-comprehended
beings who struggled in the darker ages like mi-
crobes in a piece of flesh, or like the Christian
paupers in an English manufacturing town, all
paved the way for the development of the race,
perhaps, intended, from the beginning, to rule
mankind. From when King Alfred toasted his
cakes and made his candles marked in rings *
(like those weird bottles full of sand from Alum
Bay) to measure time, down to the period when
our late Sovereign wrote her " Diary in the
Highlands/' is but a moment in the history of
mankind. Still, in the interval, our race has had
full leisure to mature. Saxon stolidity and Celtic

* Staple industry of the Isle of Wight.

172

guile, Teutonic dulness, Norman pride, all tem-
pered with east wind, baptized with mist, nar-
rowed by insularity, swollen with good fortune,
and rendered overbearing with much wealth, have
worked together to produce the type. A bold,
beef-eating, generous, narrow-minded type, kindly
but arrogant ; the men fine specimens of well-fed
animals, red in the blood and face ; the women
cleanly, " upstanding " creatures, most divinely
tall ; both sexes slow of comprehension, but yet
not wanting sense ; great feeders, lovers of
strong drinks, and given to brutal sports, as were
their prototypes, the men of ancient Rome ;
dogged as bull-dogs, quick to compassion for the
sufferers from the injustice of their neighbours ;
thinking that they themselves can do no wrong,
athletic though luxurious ; impatient of all hard-
ships, yet enduring them when business shows a
profit or when honour calls ; moralists, if such
exist, and still, like cats, not quite averse to fish
when the turn serves ; clear-headed in affairs,
but idealists and, in the main, wrong-headed in
their views of life ; priding themselves most
chiefly on their faults, and resolute to carry all
those virtues which they lack at home, to other
lands.

Thus, through the mist of time, the Celto-
Saxon race emerged from heathendom and woad,
and, in the fulness of the Creator's pleasure,
became the tweed-clad Englishman. Much of
the earth was his, and in the skies he had his

NIGGERS 173

mansion ready, well aired, with every appliance
known to modern sanitary science waiting for
him, and a large Bible on the chest of drawers in
every room. Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
India, and countless islands, useful as coaling
stations and depots where to stack his Bibles for
diffusion amongst the heathen, all owned his
sway. Races, as different from his own as is a
rabbit from an elephant, were ruled by tweed-
clad satraps expedited from the public schools,
the universities, or were administered by the dried
fruits culled from the Imperial Bar. But whilst
God's favoured nation thus had run its course,
the French, the Germans, Austrians, Spaniards,
Dutch, Greeks, Italians, and all the futile remnant
of mankind outside " our flag " had struggled to
equal them. True that in most particulars they
were inferior. Their beer was weak, their shoddy
not so artfully diffused right through their cloth,
their cottons less well " sized," the constitution of
their realm less nebulous, or the Orders of their
Churches better authenticated, than were our own.
No individual of their various nationalities by a
whole life of grace was ever half so moral as the
worst of us is born.

And so I leave them weltering in their attempts
to copy us, and turn to those of whom I had in-
tended first to write, but whom the virtues,
power, might, and dominion of our race, have
caused me to forget.

I wished to show Jahve Sabbaoth made the

174 NIGGERS

earth, planted his men, his beasts, his trees upon
it, and then as if half doubtful of himself left it to
simmer slowly till his Englishmen stood forth.
I felt he was our God, jealous and blood-thirsty, as
in his writings he has let us see ; our God, and we
His people, faithful to bloodshed, not that we
liked it, but because we knew we did His will.
We are His people and it was natural that He
should give mankind into our hand. But yet it
seemed that we had grown so godlike in ourselves
that perhaps Jahve was waiting for us to indicate
the way. He made the world and stocked it,
planting apparently without design the basest
peoples in the most favoured lands ; then we stood
forth to help him, and by degrees carried out all he
thought of from the first.

In Africa, Australia, and in America, in all the
myriad islands of the southern seas inferior races
dwell. They have their names, their paltry
racial differences, some are jet black, some copper-
coloured, flat-nosed, high-featured, tall, short,
hideous or handsome — what is that to us ? We
lump them all as niggers, being convinced that
their chief quality is their difference from .our-
selves.

Hindus, as Brahmins, Bengalis, and the
dwellers in Bombay ; the Cingalese, Sikhs and
Pathans, Rajpoots, Parsis, Afghans, Kashmiris,
Beluchis, Burmese, with all the peoples from the
Caspian Sea to Timur Laut, are thus described.
Arabs are " niggers."

NIGGERS 175

So are Malays, the Malagasy, Japanese, Chinese,
Red Indians, as Sioux, Comanches, Navajos,
Apaches with Zapatecas, the Esquimaux, and in
the south Ranqueles, Lenguas, Pampas, Pehuel-
ches, Tobas, and Araucanos, all these are " nig-
gers " though their hair is straight. Turks,
Persians, Levantines, Egyptians, Moors, and
generally all those of almost any race whose skins
are darker than our own, and whose ideas of
faith, of matrimony, banking, and therapeutics
differ from those held by the dwellers of the meri-
dian of Primrose Hill, cannot escape. Men of the
Latin races, though not born free, can purchase
freedom with a price, that is, if they conform to
our ideas, are rich and wash, ride bicycles, and
gamble on the Stock Exchange. If they are poor,
then woe betide them, let them paint their faces
white with all the ceruse which ever Venice
furnished, to the black favour shall they come. A
plague of pigments, blackness is in the heart, not
in the face, and poverty, no matter how it washes,
still is black.

Niggers are niggers, whether black or white,
but the archtype is found in Africa.

Oh Africa, land created out of sheer spleen,
as if to show that even Jahve himself suffered at
times from long-continued work ; in spleen, or
else contrived out of his bounty to encourage us
and serve as sweetener to his most favoured nation
in its self-appointed task ! A country rich in it-
self, in animals, in vegetation, and in those

12

176 NIGGERS

minerals in which we chiefly see the evidence of
the Creator's power. Rich, and yet given up to
such a kind of men that they are hardly to be
held as men at all. Scripture itself has asked half
doubtingly if they can change their skins, but we
who know the Scriptures as we know Bradshaw,
making them books of reference in which to
search for precepts to support our acts, are ready
to reply.

The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, and
therefore we are ready to possess his land and to
uproot him for the general welfare of mankind,
smiting him hip and thigh, as the Jews did the
Canaanites when first they opened up the promis-
ed land. Niggers who have no cannons have no
rights. Their land is ours, their cattle and their
fields, their houses ours ; their arms, their poor
utensils, and everything they have ; their women,
too, are ours to use as concubines, to beat, ex-
change, to barter off for gunpowder or gin, ours
to infect with syphilis, leave with child, outrage,
torment, and make by contact with the vilest of
our vile, more vile than beasts.

Yet take us kindly, and at once the tender
nature of our hearts is manifest to all. Cretans,
Armenians, Cubans, Macedonians we com-
miserate, subscribe, and feel for, our feeling souls
are wrung when Outlanders cannot get votes.
Bishops and cardinals and statesmen, with philan-
thropists and pious ladies, all go wild about the
Turks.

NIGGERS 177

England's great heart is sound, it beats for all
the sorrows of mankind ; we must press on, we
owe it to ourselves and to our God ; ours to
perform our duty, his to provide the field ; the
world is ours, let us press on to do our mutual will,
and lose no time, in case inferior aping nations
may forestall us, cut in between us and all those
we burn to serve, and having done so, then shoot
out their tongues and say : " These were but
weaklings, and their God made in their image,
merely an Anglo-Saxon and anthropomorphous
fool."

AT TORFAIEH

A SHADE of dissatisfaction crept over the
dark, handsome face of Najim, the
Syrian, as he sat cleaning his pistol at the door of
the factory at Cape Juby. In front the desert,
flat, sandy, and grown over with low " sudra "
bushes, as is the prairie overgrown with mezquite
and with huisache in Western Texas. Behind,
the sea, shipless and desolate, breaking upon the
coast in long lines of surf, thundering and roaring
ceaselessly. On the horizon a faint blue cloud
just indicated the whereabouts of Lanzarote.

The factory itself, square-built and ugly, look-
ing just like a piece of Manchester adrift in Africa,
only redeemed from stark vulgarity by the cannon
on the roof. Upon a little island, about three
hundred yards to seaward, the fort looked frown-
ingly, and showed the nozzles of its three guns
through embrasures pointing towards the shore,
as emblems of the milder faith the pious traders
hoped to introduce.

Mecca and Galilee ; the sword and fishing-
178

AT TORFAIEH 179

net ; on the one hand barbarity, upon the other
progress ; long guns, curved daggers, flying haiks,
polygamy, the old-world life, opposed to cotton
goods, arms of precision, store clothes, and the
exterior graces which the interior virtues of our
time and race induce. Outpost of progress, now,
alas ! submerged once more in the dark flood of
Islam ; portion of Scotland, reft from the mother
country and erratically disposed in Africa in the
same way that bits of Cromarty are found scat-
tered sporadically about the map. Torfaieh was
as Scotch, or even still more Scotch, than Peebles,
Lesmahagow, or the Cowcaddens, for the setting
went for nothing in comparison with the North
British composition of the place. Decent and
orderly the Scottish clerks, the tall, red-bearded
manager ; Scotch the pioneer, known to the
Arabs down into the Sahara as " M'Kenzie," he
who had found the place, surveyed it, planned to
submerge the desert, and to sail to Timbuctoo,
had got the company together, had sweated blood
and water and regarded " Juby " as the apple of
his eye. Order and due precision of accounts,
great ledgers, beer upon tap, whiskey served out
" medicinally," prayers upon Sunday, no trifling
with the Arab women ever allowed, a moral tone,
a strict attention to commercial principles, and
yet no trade, for by a cursed fate the " dodder-
ing " English directors who controlled the cash
had sent an order that no trading should be done,
as they were waiting for the time when a paternal

i8o AT TORFAIEH

Government should equip them with a charter,
and place them on a level with the Niger Company,
and the philanthropists who smoked the " nig-
gers " in the caves of the Matoppo Hills.

Therefore the order ran, " Let no one bring-
ing trade approach the place/' and natives having
journeyed from the recesses of the desert with
camels packed with wool, descried the factory
low in the horizon, drank their last draught of
water and hurried on their beasts, to find them-
selves greeted with rifle fire, and told to keep away.
Then from the windows broke a fusillade of guns,
and Najim, the Syrian interpreter, would mount
upon his horse, and galloping towards the wonder-
ing, would-be traders, tell them on peril of their
lives to keep away if they brought trade, but to
come on and camp if they had none. This not
unnaturally led to ill-feeling, for the wool had to
be buried in the sand till, as the Arabs said, it
pleased Allah to restore the Company to
health.

And so they passed their lives like men upon a
ship, not often daring to go far from their factory,
occasionally venturing to hunt gazelles, but
usually returning, hunted themselves by the ex-
asperated Arabs, who fired on them when and
where they got a chance. But not to lose their
hold entirely upon the place, the Company paid all
the more important chiefs allowances, which they
thought tribute, and a feeling of contempt sprang
up, tempered with kindliness and typified by the

AT TORFAIEH 181

phrase " Our Christians ; " these they protected
and found necessary, but esteemed mad, as are, in
fact, all Nazarenes and those who have no know-
ledge of the Faith. A pleasant, idle, not un-
healthy, beery, and contemplative life ; few
stood it long, but sought relief in drink or else
went mad, and all the time the Company were
convinced the Arabs (whom they had never seen)
were peaceably inclined, though they had had a
manager murdered not half a mile outside the
gate.

So all went well both up and down the coast,
into the desert, and up to the Wad Nun, where
Dahman-el-Beiruc reigned over the most fanatic
of all the tribes. The legend grew about the mad
Christians, who fired on traders, but yet paid good
allowances to chiefs to encourage trade, and
welcomed every one so that he came with empty
hands. And then, as if on purpose to confirm
the Arabs in their belief that Nazarenes are all
stark mad, another rival band of Bedlamites
appeared, all bursting to acquire the hypothetic
trade and to supplant their brother madmen in the
race. Money was freely spent upon the chiefs,
five thousand dollars falling to the share of one of
them, who brought it loaded upon two camels to
an employe of the Cape Juby Company to keep.
Then these, too, faded into space, leaving some
two or three of their adventurers captive amongst
the desert tribes, and gloom settled upon Cape
Juby, broken but by the three monthly visits of

1 82 AT TORFAIEH

the chiefs for their allowance, and an occasional
interchange of friendly shots at a long range with
would-be traders from afar. But in the meantime
Najim, the Syrian, rose from interpreter to
manager, and all the while he did his duty,
entering sacks of rice and bags of bullets, chests of
tea, barrels of gunpowder, cases of gin, and bales
of cloth in ledgers, or seeing it was duly done by
the Scotch clerks, the desert life took hold of him
as it has taken hold of many another of those sons
of Adam whom a cynic deity has cursed with
imagination, and rendered them unfit for ordinary
work. The wild old life, the camels, the lean and
worthless-looking but untiring desert horses, the
blue clad, long-haired Arabs, with their close
bargaining for trifles, and boundless generosity
in larger things, the low horizon, and the pure
language spoken by the people — always a pleasure
to a man of Arab blood — took so firm a grip of
him that all his sympathies were outside the fort,
and his desire was to be like the natives in thought
and dress.

When not on duty he wore the Arab clothes,
talked with the tribesmen, learned their lore, rode
in the powder play, heard of the " ould el naama "
(son of the ostrich), the child, who, lost by his
parents, had found a foster-parent in an ostrich,
and in whose capture three good mares were
tired, and by degrees insensibly grew to think the
desert life the best which it has pleased Allah to
show to man, All the chiefs knew him and looked

AT TORFAIEH 183

on him as a sort of landmark set up between the
Christians and Islam. Arab in blood, Arab in
sympathy as regards the desert life, but yet a
Christian, their wonder knew no bounds. " You
speak like us, have our own skin, our eyes, read
the Koran, and understand it ; what then re-
strains you from saying you are one of us, joining
the Faith, marrying amongst us, and leading
amongst the tribesmen the life you say you love ?"
In fact, some thought he was a Moslem, but from
policy pretended to be a Christian, until he, a
Syrian of the Syrians, told them that for a
thousand years his people had been Christians, and
that, though not believing it, he yet would die a
member of the Faith in which he had been born.
This took their fancy, for Arabs are always taken
with a bold answer, and they said : " Najim, you
are a man, that is the way to speak, Christian or
Moslem, you are still our friend." Then cunning,
as only they themselves, they sought for his
opinion upon the reality of the conversion of
other Syrians who had left the Company and
married in the tribe. But he, at least as subtle
as they themselves, answered evasively that the
heart of man is as the darkness of a starless night,
and God alone can see into its depths.

The Arabs laughed and said, " By the Nabi he
knows as much as we ourselves," they knowing
nothing of any subject under heaven but camels'
footprints in the sand, signs of the weather, the
names of some few stars, together with the daily

i84 AT TORFAIEH

ceremonials of their faith, which constitute their
life.

So, as he sat cleaning his nickelled Smith and
Wessen pistol, bought in New York, that Mecca
of all young Syrians, he saw far off upon the plain,
dust rising, and was sure that it betokened the
arrival of some chief, and as the allotted time for
paying the allowances (or tribute) had not come,
he knew, as trade by this time was well frightened
off, that it portended the advent of some Arab
come to beg. Nothing annoyed him more than
these begging ventures of the chiefs. As manager
he was tied down to a certain set allowance, and
yet to send a man away after, perhaps, a three
weeks' journey empty-handed, was impolitic,
and besides hurt his feelings, for, like all generous-
minded men, " No " stuck in his soul ; and when
pronounced, even with reason, rose up against
him as a meanness, for, though quick-witted as
most Syrians are, he was not of the race of men
who, pending the due carrying out of Scripture,
possess the earth.

Like ships almost hull down on the horizon,
the caravan appeared, and first the riders, on the
low scrubby plain, seemingly seated in the air,
and then the camels heaving into sight, swaying
and sliding through the sand, their long necks
waving to and fro as every now and then they
snatched a bite from the low, thorny scrub.
Perched on them, their faces veiled, spears in
their hands, their riders sat, and in the wake

AT TORFAIEE 185

eight or ten semi-naked men on foot, driving the
donkeys, without which, in the West Sahara no
train of camels is complete. Lastly, a group of
horsemen, all armed with guns and sitting on their
high red saddles, swathed in their indigo robes, im-
passable and with the far-off look as if the eye
saw through the middle distance and did not take
it in, being fixed on the horizon, which is peculiar
to all riders on frontiers, deserts, and to those
whose safety rests on their power of seeing the
approaching stranger first.

Arrived before the factory the travellers halted,
made their camels kneel, got off, and set about
their preparations for a camp in the methodical
but dawdling way that travellers on camels all
effect. Then they sat talking fully an hour, for
every movement in the desert is as much discussed
as amongst Indians in America, or amongst
county councillors deliberating what next to lay
upon the ratepayer ; and it by no means follows
that men, having reached their journey's end,
enter the city they have arrived at, or begin the
business on which they have set out, for if the
council so determines, it is just as likely that they
may all return without a word. But in an hour or
two, prayers duly said, dates and rice eaten, green
tea discussed, a single figure, veiled to the eyes,
wrapped in a blue burnoose, and holding in its
hand a long flint gun, hooped round the barrel
with brass, and with a Spanish dollar hanging from
the twisted stock, stalked to the house and asked

1 86 AT TORFAIEH

for Najim, Najim el Shami, and was admitted
through the iron-plated door into the courtyard
of the house. There Najim received him, and he
began, " Ah, Najim, my heart has longed for you ;
in the desert below Sagiet-el-Hamara I said, ' I
will arise and take my camels and will see my
friend. Is he not chief of all our Christians ? '
So I unveiled my head, and in the sight of all men,
openly, I took my way. All men know of me, my
name is Bu Dabous ; when men ask of me, Najim,
say you know my name. Many have sought my
friendship, letters arrive asking me to be true to
them, some from the Sultan, five from Dahman-
el-Beiruc. I tell you, Najim, five from Dahman-
el-Beiruc. What did I do ? I, Bu Dabous, give
not my friendship lightly, so I said, ' The Sultan,
well, he is far away, his messenger may wait, and
Dahman-el-Beiruc, how can I answer so many
letters all at once ? I will seek Najim, and will
tell him of my straits/ Ah, Najim, in my tents
there is nothing ; sugar, no sugar, tea, not a
pound, no powder, and my children naked for
want of cloth. So I took only five camels, and
but ten of my best friends, and came to seek you
Najim, knowing you are my friend, and that whilst
you lived you would not let men say that Bu
Dabous came to ask a favour and returned un-
blessed/' Then Najim, sore perplexed, took up
his parable. " Ah, Bu Dabous, right glad am I to
see you, and the Company in all their letters write
to me saying that they regard you as a friend.

AT TORFAIEH 187

But, still, you know I am but manager, and it is
far beyond my power to give you what you want.
Each article I take is to be paid for, and you do
not wish, I think, that I should be a loser by my
friend. Yet, as a friend, I will exceed my power,
and on my own account take from the store a
bale of cloth, two chests of tea, a cask of sugar, and
some gunpowder. These shall be yours, so that
you may not say I am insensible to friendship,
and disregard the trouble you have taken to come
so far." Then Bu Dabous rose gravely from his
seat and said, " Najim, I was deceived. I fear
you are no friend, but a true Christian at the
heart, one of these men who know no generosity,
and whose sole God is pelf. Money, money, that
is the Christians' God. That which you offer me
is not enough for even one of my ten friends.
Was it for this I sent the Sultan's messenger away
and left five letters from Dahman-el-Beiruc
without reply ? But, Najim, not to shame you,"
and as he spoke he touched the Syrian lightly on
the chest with his long, thin, brown hand, dyed
blue with rubbing on his woad-stained clothes,
" I will take credit from you, and all shall be
arranged. The credit shall be large, not to dis-
grace me, and that the Company may say Najim
does business with a wealthy man. Close to
Shangiet, not fifteen days from here, I have five
or six thousand dollars of fine wool. Now, there-
fore, give me forty chests of tea and twenty bales
of cloth, a cask of gunpowder, ten guns, some lead,

1 88 AT TORFAIEH

a hundred loaves of sugar, and add, just as a
favour for myself, a pair of scissors and a little
knife to trim my nails."

Poor Najim heard the demand with horror,
and refused point-blank, and Bu Dabous, seat-
ing himself again, said, " Here will I sit, O Najim,
till your heart speaks and I receive that which I
want." His patience done, Najim called to his
native police, and bidding them take from the
store some tea and sugar and a bale of cloth, had
Bu Dabous conducted to the gate. But from the
middle of the men who pushed him roughly a
voice arose. " See how your soldiers use your
friend, give me, I pray, the scissors and the little
knife/' Then after a due interval had passed,
slowly the " cafila " took the road towards the
south, swaying and waving to and fro, passed out
into the desert, raising a column of fine dust ;
the donkeys followed, and the horsemen bringing
up the rear, turned in their saddles and fired a
harmless volley at the fort. -

Then, as he looked from off the roof, Najim
beheld them slowly melt into the low horizon,
the footfalls of their animals dulled in the sand,
the riders perched high on their camels, or sitting
upright on their horses, their guns carried erect
like spears. Lastly they sank into the sand from
whence they came, and Najim lighting a cigar-
ette, descended from the roof, and going to his
office turned to his ledger with a sigh.

Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis $ Son, Ltd., The Trinity
Press, Worcester.

Aeknowlei Igment is hereby made of
the previous appearance of these Stories
in " Saturday Review," " Justice" and
" Badminton."

m

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PR6013.R19I7 1925

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